[81] The Wemysses’ footman was one of the few arrested on suspicion of being a ringleader in the Porteous riot.
[82] John’s Coffee-house was then situated in the north-east corner of Parliament Close.
[83] Baijen-hole, see [note], [p. 155].
[84] In the early times above referred to, £100 was accounted a sufficient capital for a young goldsmith—being just so much as purchased his furnace, tools, &c., served to fit up his shop, and enabled him to enter the Incorporation, which alone required £40 out of the £100. The stock with which George Heriot commenced business at a much earlier period (1580)—said to have been about £200—must therefore be considered a proof of the wealth of that celebrated person’s family.
[85] Peter had, in early life, been kidnapped and sold to the plantations. After spending some time among the North American Indians, he came back to Scotland, and began business in Edinburgh as a vintner. Robert Fergusson, in his poem entitled The Rising of the Session, thus alludes to a little tavern he kept within the Parliament House:
‘This vacance is a heavy doom
On Indian Peter’s coffee-room,
For a’ his china pigs are toom;
Nor do we see
In wine the soukar biskets soom