374 Proceedings of the Poyal Society of Edinburgh. [Sess. 
the Board was strongly divided on the subject of financial possibility, 
and after his election the voice of the new member was at once raised in 
favour of a bold policy, and his views soon became those of the Board, 
who with unexampled courage launched on the scheme which has given to 
the Asylum Craig House and the adjoining buildings on Craiglockhart Hill. 
That they faced the expenditure of £150, 000, and that the venture had proved 
an absolute success, financially as well as practically, was an assured fact 
before Sir John’s death, and it was in the year 1921 that, at the request of 
his colleagues, he consented to sit for his portrait, as being the only survivor 
of the 1887 Board. This portrait now hangs in the hall of Craig House. 
It was in the same year that the honour of knighthood was conferred 
upon him. 
With his work on Leases Rankine’s more important contributions 
to legal literature ended. But shortly before his death he published a 
briefer work on the more technical subject of Personal Bar or LJstopel, 
which was well received on both sides of the Border. It will, however, 
be of interest to the Society to know that during the last three or four 
years of his life he occupied some of his leisure at Threepwood in collecting 
references to Scottish law in the Waverley Novels, which it is believed he 
contemplated making the foundation of an article on Sir Walter Scott’s 
obligations to the law of Scotland in the creation of many of his characters. 
It would not do justice to the subject of this brief reference were 
something not to be said of John Rankine at Threepwood, familiar to him 
from boyhood, and the country home of his later years. There was to be 
found, not the student of Scots Law, the writer or professor, but the 
landowner, farming his own land, ready and able to talk of crops and 
stock with grieve or farm hand. But there especially did he play most 
perfectly the role of the genial host, and many a friend has enjoyed 
a visit to his semi-moorland domain through which, as he was always 
careful to point out, ran the ancient Girthgate. 
There was much indeed in Threepwood, simply as it stands on a 
hillside as high as the top of Arthur Seat, to attract the visitor, for the 
scene of much of Border history and Border fiction is spread out to view. 
It is within three or four miles of the spot where Angus “ belled the Cat.” 
Near the site of the old house was the White Lady’s well of Sir Walter’s 
Monastery. On Threepwood rises the stream which in a couple of miles 
passes between the Border keeps, once the strongholds of monastery tenants, 
one of which, Glendearg, was the home of Halbert Glendinning. Down 
the banks of its lower course and through the Faery Dean recklessly rode 
Sir Percy Shafton, until he was brought up by the Tweed and the old 
