and had made a seizure of tea under that character; besides being guilty of several other illegal acts. But the judges held that a conviction and sentence in a proper court were the only circumstances that could justify the rejection of a party's evidence in a criminal cause. Accordingly, as Macdonald had never been so tried and convicted, he was allowed to give evidence, although, in addition to the preceding objections, it was also proved that he had claimed the reward offered in the case now under examination; a circumstance which he himself had previously denied to the court in the most positive terms.

Macdonald deposed that, eight months before the commission of the crime, he had been requested by Falconer, Bruce, and Dick, to join them in a plan for robbing the bank, and had been repeatedly spoken to about the same scheme afterwards, being at the same time bound to secrecy by a terrible oath. Two other persons were concerned, according to the witness, with the three mentioned; but either these men were out of the way, or the court appears to have permitted him to keep the names of these parties to himself. Macdonald then proceeded to state that Falconer and his companions had called upon him late on the Saturday night on which the bank was robbed, and desired him, with threats, to rise out of bed and follow them to the bank. They left him, and he rose and dressed himself. On going into the street, he met two women, Anne Valentine and one Menzies, the former of whom was seeking a boy, her son. With these women he went towards the town-house, which is above the bank, the hall of the town-house being separate from the bank-office only by a single floor and ceiling in one part. In the Guildhall he saw the glimmer of a light, and conjectured that the plunderers had made their way into it. He and his companions went up the town-hall steps, and there, on looking through the keyhole, they saw Falconer with his coat off, and Bruce and the others engaged in fastening a rope round his waist, for the purpose of letting him down through a hole which they had made. Macdonald saw Falconer let down, after

which he and those with him left the town-hall steps, and went back to the street. They remained there till the five plunderers came out, and were seen by them. This took place about one on the Sunday morning.

This was Macdonald's evidence, and it was corroborated by the women Valentine and Menzies, as respected the seeing of the panels on the street and in the town-hall.

This was the whole evidence against Falconer and Bruce. The counter - testimony was of various kinds. The accused were persons of respectable station and character; their accusers were not. A living friend of Bruce, who was his schoolfellow and intimate friend, declares to us that no one who knew him believed for a moment in his guilt. Again, each of the prisoners brought witnesses to prove an alibi, and these witnesses were of respectable character; but unfortunately their testimony did not bear upon the precise hour at which the robbery was committed. Three witnesses saw Falconer in his own house between ten and eleven, and the latest visitor saw him in bed, complaining of illness. Three witnesses deposed also to Bruce being at home late on Saturday night; one person heard him reading at twelve o'clock at night. Moreover, the counsel for the prisoners declared that it was impossible for Macdonald and the women to have seen the hole through which the robbers had descended into the bank, from their position at the town-hall door. Strange to say, this point, which would have utterly subverted the whole criminatory evidence, does not appear to have been thoroughly examined into.

Notwithstanding the bad character of Macdonald, the main witness, and the strong points in favour of the accused, Lord Hailes, the presiding judge, summed up against them, and the jury gave a verdict of guilty by a plurality of voices. The prisoners were condemned to death; yet, as the jury were divided on the case, so do the highest authorities of the land appear to have been. The unfortunate men were respited two different times. At their trial, as well as during the whole of their con

finement, they uniformly denied their accession to the robbery, and all knowledge of any intention to perpetrate it. Will it be credited? These two unfortunate men, to the everlasting disgrace of the judges, were executed at Edinburgh on the 24th of December 1788. Their behaviour on the scaffold,' says the Scots Magazine of the day,' was devout, serious, and becoming; and in their last address they implored that mercy and forgiveness might be extended to those unhappy persons by whose testimony they had been thus untimely cut off. It is hoped that time, which unveils the dark and hidden doings of the most artful, will yet reveal to the public the whole history of this mysterious affair.'

Little more than a year after the execution of these unfortunate men, who died in the prime of life, a cause was brought before the Court of Session, in which Alexander Macdonald, Alexander Menzies, and Anne Kermack, were the parties on one side, while the heirs of William Bruce, late shipmaster in Dundee, and either father or uncle to the executed Peter Bruce, were implicated on the other side. Macdonald had instituted a process for the recovery of L.384, for which he held a bill purporting to have been granted by William Bruce. The result of the trial was, that Macdonald was found guilty of a gross fraud in obtaining the bill, and his witnesses and accomplices convicted of direct perjury. Macdonald was sentenced to be transported beyond seas for fourteen years, expelled from Scotland for life, and declared infamous. Menzies received the same sentence, with this difference, that his transmarine exile was for seven years; and in sentencing him, the Lord President declared him to be a 'most infamous man, dangerous to society, and one who feared neither God nor man.' The woman received a sentence more lenient, but was also declared infamous according to the forms of law of the day.

The exposure of this conspiracy excited a dire suspicion in the public mind. The name of Menzies will be remembered as having been that of one of the evidences against

Falconer and Bruce. In short, there appeared too much reason to fear that Macdonald had induced a band of confederates to perjure themselves on both occasions. The public thought so; for, in sentencing the man, Lord Henderland said, that, 'had it not been for the peculiar situation of the panel, he should have proposed that a public whipping be added to the punishment; but he feared the rage of an incensed populace would prove fatal to the prisoner. The Lord President also remarked, that 'from what had appeared in this bill affair, there was room for a melancholy doubt whether all was right with respect to a late trial, but that he would leave this to God and the prisoner's own conscience.' Macdonald, who is described as a man evidently possessing superior talents,' and as having spoken for himself at the bill-trial with an energy and address worthy of a better cause,' had the hardihood to stand up and answer the Lord President's hint, by solemnly asseverating that Falconer and Bruce were really guilty of the robbery of the Dundee Bank. He also made an appeal against the sentence of banishment, which produced no effect.

Although a great portion of the public was now firmly persuaded of the innocence of Falconer and Bruce, believing, from Macdonald's audacity in bringing a fraudulent claim against the aged relative of Peter Bruce, that he was a man capable of any villany, yet a mystery hung over the subject to a certain extent. However, in the middle of the year 1790, two years after the execution of Falconer and Bruce, an extraordinary sensation was caused in Edinburgh by the commission of a number of mysterious robberies, the author or authors of which contrived to evade the vigilance of the authorities. These robberies followed each other in quick succession. For example, William Proctor, grave-digger, was knocked down and robbed, at the back of the Castle, on the night of July the 31st. Thomas Elliott, tacksman of Heriot-House toll, was knocked down and robbed at the Sciennes, on the night of August the 2d. James Logan was knocked down and robbed of a gold watch on the Earthen Mound, on the

night of August the 4th. Within the same five days alone, a housebreaking and another robbery took place. From descriptions and other circumstances, the criminal authorities were led to believe these acts, with many others, to have been committed by one daring and active man. But all their exertions were inefficient in tracking the guilty party. At length suspicion fell upon a soldier in the Castle. Inquiry and a trial followed, when it was discovered that this soldier, William Gadesby, then only twenty-eight years of age, had not only committed the series of robberies which had attracted so much attention, but had carried on a similar course, with almost unexampled success and daring, from the age of fourteen upwards. Since his enlisting, he had contrived to leave the Castle repeatedly by night: he mentioned at his trial that hackney-coaches, going in and out at late hours from the officers' barracks, afforded him his usual means of passage. This singular malefactor, whose exploits also form a theme of remark in fireside tales in Scotland, was sentenced to die on the scaffold, on the 20th of February 1791.

Amongst his greatest crimes, though not one of those for which he suffered, must be reckoned that of his having allowed two innocent men to go to the scaffold for a crime not their own, but his. Such was the case. William Gadesby was the robber of the Dundee Bank. The wretch Macdonald, and the women who supported his evidence, had been actuated by the miserable desire to possess the stipulated reward, and had burdened their souls with the heavy crime of perjury in order to accomplish that object. Speaking of the execution of Gadesby, the Annual Register for 1791 states: With his last breath he declared Falconer and Bruce, who were executed here two years ago for robbing the Dundee Bank, to be innocent of that crime, and acknowledged his own guilt!' The deed had been committed by him before entering the army.

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The discovery that two innocent individuals had been judicially murdered, produced a sensation of horror in the public mind; but what the judges said or thought on