NIDDR1E HOUSE. 145 



rounds our native town To the grounds about 



Niddrie my work gives me access. Often in the fine 

 summer evenings have I sauntered through its fields 

 and woods, alone but not solitary, watching the last 

 beam of the sun as it tinged with a purple hue the 

 Pentland hills, or as it streamed on the roofless walls 



and dismantled turrets of Craigmillar Castle 



Niddrie House is a large irregular building, bearing 

 date in one part 1636, and in another not yet finished. 

 The modern addition will, when the winter storms of 

 a few years have soiled the natural hue of the stone 

 and rounded the angular mouldings, appear by far 

 the most antique, as it is executed in the heaviest style 

 of the Saxon Gothic. The large mullioned windows 

 are crowned with rich labels, and the walls deeply in- 

 dented with moulded embrasures. Octagon turrets rising 

 above the roof project from every corner, and instead 

 of those large stacks of chimneys which disfigure many 

 modern houses, here every one has its own airy column, 

 connected at top to the rest by a star-like cope. When 

 finished, you might suppose this building, from its 

 antique appearance and secluded situation, to have been 

 some nunnery founded by that church-endowing monarch, 

 David I. Adjoining the house is a large garden, which, 

 from its irregular and partial cultivation, differs very little 

 in appearance from the surrounding pleasure-grounds. 

 In that corner of it which lies nearest the north-west gable 

 of the house is a vault in which the Wauchopes of Niddrie, 

 time immemorial, have been interred. Its front is screened 

 by a huge bush of ivy which, overshading the door and 

 twining about a sepulchral urn that rests directly above, 

 gives the whole a gloomy yet picturesque appearance. 

 Death does not move the bodies of the proprietors of 

 Niddrie far from the house which sheltered them when 



VOL. I. 10 



