Note 85 — THE PARLIAMENT CLOSE.
Reading edition
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 As light’s a flee.’
Peter afterwards established a penny-post in Edinburgh, which became so profitable in his hands that the General Post-office gave him a handsome compensation for it. He was also the first to print a street directory in Edinburgh. He died January 19, 1799.