Immediately underneath upon the south, you command the yards of the High
School, and the towers and courts of the new Jail--a large place,
castellated to the extent of folly, standing by itself on the edge of a
steep cliff, and often joyfully hailed by tourists as the Castle. In the
one, you may perhaps see female prisoners taking exercise like a string
of nuns; in the other, schoolboys running at play and their shadows
keeping step with them. From the bottom of the valley, a gigantic
chimney rises almost to the level of the eye, a taller and a shapelier
edifice than Nelson's Monument. Look a little farther, and there is
Holyrood Palace, with its Gothic frontal and ruined abbey, and the red
sentry pacing smartly to and fro before the door like a mechanical
figure in a panorama. By way of an outpost, you can single out the
little peak-roofed lodge, over which Rizzio's murderers made their
escape, and where Queen Mary herself, according to gossip, bathed in
white wine to entertain her loveliness. Behind and overhead, lie the
Queen's Park, from Muschat's Cairn to Dumbiedykes, St. Margaret's Loch,
and the long wall of Salisbury Crags; and thence, by knoll and rocky
bulwark and precipitous slope, the eye rises to the top of Arthur's
Seat, a hill for magnitude, a mountain in virtue of its bold design.
This upon your left. Upon the right, the roofs and spires of the Old
Town climb one above another to where the citadel prints its broad bulk
and jagged crown of bastions on the western sky.--Perhaps it is now one
in the afternoon; and at the same instant of time, a ball rises to the
summit of Nelson's flagstaff close at hand, and, far away, a puff of
smoke followed by a report bursts from the half-moon battery at the
Castle. This is the time-gun by which people set their watches, as far
as the sea coast or in hill farms upon the Pentlands.--To complete the
view, the eye enfilades Princes Street, black with traffic, and has a
broad look over the valley between the Old Town and the New: here, full
of railway trains and stepped over by the high North Bridge upon its
many columns, and there, green with trees and gardens.

On the north, the Calton Hill is neither so abrupt in itself nor has it
so exceptional an outlook; and yet even here it commands a striking
prospect. A gully separates it from the New Town. This is Greenside,
where witches were burned and tournaments held in former days. Down that
almost precipitous bank, Bothwell launched his horse, and so first, as
they say, attracted the bright eyes of Mary. It is now tessellated with
sheets and blankets out to dry, and the sound of people beating carpets
is rarely absent. Beyond all this, the suburbs run out to Leith; Leith
camps on the seaside with her forest of masts; Leith roads are full of
ships at anchor; the sun picks out the white pharos upon Inchkeith
Island: the Firth extends on either hand from the Ferry to the May; the
towns of Fifeshire sit, each in its bank of blowing smoke, along the
opposite coast; and the hills inclose the view, except to the farthest
east, where the haze of the horizon rests upon the open sea. There lies
the road to Norway: a dear road for Sir Patrick Spens and his Scots
Lords; and yonder smoke on the hither side of Largo Law is Aberdour,
from whence they sailed to seek a queen for Scotland.

    "O lang, lang, may the ladies sit,
      Wi' their fans into their hand,
    Or e'er they see Sir Patrick Spens
      Come sailing to the land!"

The sight of the sea, even from a city, will bring thoughts of storm and
sea disaster. The sailors' wives of Leith and the fisherwomen of
Cockenzie, not sitting languorously with fans, but crowding to the tail
of the harbour with a shawl about their ears, may still look vainly for
brave Scotsmen who will return no more, or boats that have gone on their
last fishing. Since Sir Patrick sailed from Aberdour, what a multitude
have gone down in the North Sea! Yonder is Auldhame, where the London
smack went ashore and wreckers cut the rings from ladies' fingers; and a
few miles round Fife Ness is the fatal Inchcape, now a star of guidance;
and the lee shore to the east of the Inchcape is that Forfarshire coast
where Mucklebackit sorrowed for his son.

These are the main features of the scene roughly sketched. How they are
all tilted by the inclination of the ground, how each stands out in
delicate relief against the rest, what manifold detail, and play of sun
and shadow, animate and accentuate the picture, is a matter for a person
on the spot, and turning swiftly on his heels, to grasp and bind
together in one comprehensive look. It is the character of such a
prospect, to be full of change and of things moving. The multiplicity
embarrasses the eye; and the mind, among so much, suffers itself to grow
absorbed with single points. You remark a tree in a hedgerow, or follow
a cart along a country road. You turn to the city, and see children,
dwarfed by distance into pygmies, at play about suburban doorsteps; you
have a glimpse upon a thoroughfare where people are densely moving; you
note ridge after ridge of chimney-stacks running downhill one behind
another, and church spires rising bravely from the sea of roofs. At one
of the innumerable windows, you watch a figure moving; on one of the
multitude of roofs, you watch clambering chimney-sweeps. The wind takes
a run and scatters the smoke; bells are heard, far and near, faint and
loud, to tell the hour; or perhaps a bird goes dipping evenly over the
housetops, like a gull across the waves. And here you are in the
meantime, on this pastoral hillside, among nibbling sheep and looked
upon by monumental buildings.

Return thither on some clear, dark, moonless night, with a ring of frost
in the air, and only a star or two set sparsely in the vault of heaven;
and you will find a sight as stimulating as the hoariest summit of the
Alps. The solitude seems perfect; the patient astronomer, flat on his
back under the Observatory dome and spying heaven's secrets, is your
only neighbour; and yet from all round you there come up the dull hum of
the city, the tramp of countless people marching out of time, the rattle
of carriages and the continuous jingle of the tramway bells. An hour or
so before, the gas was turned on; lamplighters scoured the city; in
every house, from kitchen to attic, the windows kindled and gleamed
forth into the dusk. And so now, although the town lies blue and
darkling on her hills, innumerable spots of the bright element shine far
and near along the pavements and upon the high façades. Moving lights of
the railway pass and re-pass below the stationary lights upon the
bridge. Lights burn in the Jail. Lights burn high up in the tall _lands_
and on the Castle turrets; they burn low down in Greenside or along the
Park. They run out one beyond the other into the dark country. They walk
in a procession down to Leith, and shine singly far along Leith Pier.
Thus, the plan of the city and her suburbs is mapped out upon the ground
of blackness, as when a child pricks a drawing full of pinholes and
exposes it before a candle; not the darkest night of winter can conceal
her high station and fanciful design; every evening in the year she
proceeds to illuminate herself in honour of her own beauty; and as if to
complete the scheme--or rather as if some prodigal Pharaoh were
beginning to extend to the adjacent sea and country--half-way over to
Fife, there is an outpost of light upon Inchkeith, and far to seaward,
yet another on the May.

And while you are looking, across upon the Castle Hill, the drums and
bugles begin to recall the scattered garrison; the air thrills with the
sound; the bugles sing aloud; and the last rising flourish mounts and
melts into the darkness like a star: a martial swan-song, fitly rounding
in the labours of the day.




CHAPTER IX

WINTER AND NEW YEAR


The Scots dialect is singularly rich in terms of reproach against the
winter wind. _Snell_, _blae_, _nirly_, and _scowthering_, are four of
these significant vocables; they are all words that carry a shiver with
them; and for my part as I see them aligned before me on the page, I am
persuaded that a big wind comes tearing over the Firth from Burntisland
and the northern hills; I think I can hear it howl in the chimney, and
as I set my face northwards, feel its smarting kisses on my cheek. Even
in the names of places there is often a desolate, inhospitable sound;
and I remember two from the near neighbourhood of Edinburgh, Cauldhame
and Blaw-weary, that would promise but starving comfort to their
inhabitants. The inclemency of heaven, which has thus endowed the
language of Scotland with words, has also largely modified the spirit of
its poetry. Both poverty and a northern climate teach men the love of
the hearth and the sentiment of the family; and the latter, in its own
right, inclines a poet to the praise of strong waters. In Scotland, all
our singers have a stave or two for blazing fires and stout
potations:--to get indoors out of the wind and to swallow something hot
to the stomach, are benefits so easily appreciated where they dwelt!

And this is not only so in country districts where the shepherd must
wade in the snow all day after his flock, but in Edinburgh itself, and
nowhere more apparently stated than in the works of our Edinburgh poet,
Fergusson. He was a delicate youth, I take it, and willingly slunk from
the robustious winter to an inn fireside. Love was absent from his
life, or only present, if you prefer, in such a form that even the least
serious of Burns's amourettes was ennobling by comparison; and so there
is nothing to temper the sentiment of indoor revelry which pervades the
poor boy's verses. Although it is characteristic of his native town, and
the manners of its youth to the present day, this spirit has perhaps
done something to restrict his popularity. He recalls a supper-party
pleasantry with something akin to tenderness; and sounds the praises of
the act of drinking as if it were virtuous, or at least witty, in
itself. The kindly jar, the warm atmosphere of tavern parlours, and the
revelry of lawyers' clerks, do not offer by themselves the materials of
rich existence. It was not choice, so much as an external fate, that
kept Fergusson in this round of sordid pleasures. A Scot of poetic
temperament, and without religious exaltation, drops as if by nature
into the public-house. The picture may not be pleasing; but what else is
a man to do in this dog's weather?

To none but those who have themselves suffered the thing in the body,
can the gloom and depression of our Edinburgh winters be brought home.
For some constitutions there is something almost physically disgusting
in the bleak ugliness of easterly weather; the wind wearies, the sickly
sky depresses them; and they turn back from their walk to avoid the
aspect of the unrefulgent sun going down among perturbed and pallid
mists. The days are so short that a man does much of his business, and
certainly all his pleasure, by the haggard glare of gas lamps. The roads
are as heavy as a fallow. People go by, so drenched and draggle-tailed
that I have often wondered how they found the heart to undress. And
meantime the wind whistles through the town as if it were an open
meadow; and if you lie awake all night, you hear it shrieking and raving
overhead with a noise of shipwrecks and of falling houses. In a word,
life is so unsightly that there are times when the heart turns sick in
a man's inside; and the look of a tavern, or the thought of the warm,
firelit study, is like the touch of land to one who has been long
struggling with the seas.

As the weather hardens towards frost, the world begins to improve for
Edinburgh people. We enjoy superb, sub-arctic sunsets, with the profile
of the city stamped in indigo upon a sky of luminous green. The wind may
still be cold, but there is a briskness in the air that stirs good
blood. People do not all look equally sour and downcast. They fall into
two divisions: one, the knight of the blue face and hollow paunch, whom
Winter has gotten by the vitals; the other well lined with New-year's
fare, conscious of the touch of cold on his periphery, but stepping
through it by the glow of his internal fires. Such an one I remember,
triply cased in grease, whom no extremity of temperature could vanquish.
"Well," would be his jovial salutation, "here's a sneezer!" And the look
of these warm fellows is tonic, and upholds their drooping
fellow-townsmen. There is yet another class who do not depend on
corporal advantages, but support the winter in virtue of a brave and
merry heart. One shivering evening, cold enough for frost but with too
high a wind, and a little past sundown, when the lamps were beginning to
enlarge their circles in the growing dusk, a brace of barefoot lassies
were seen coming eastward in the teeth of the wind. If the one was as
much as nine, the other was certainly not more than seven. They were
miserably clad; and the pavement was so cold, you would have thought no
one could lay a naked foot on it unflinching. Yet they came along
waltzing, if you please, while the elder sang a tune to give them music.
The person who saw this, and whose heart was full of bitterness at the
moment, pocketed a reproof which has been of use to him ever since, and
which he now hands on, with his good wishes, to the reader.

At length, Edinburgh, with her satellite hills and all the sloping
country, is sheeted up in white. If it has happened in the dark hours,
nurses pluck their children out of bed and run with them to some
commanding window, whence they may see the change that has been worked
upon earth's face. "A' the hills are covered wi' snaw," they sing, "and
Winter's noo come fairly!" And the children, marveling at the silence
and the white landscape, find a spell appropriate to the season in the
words. The reverberation of the snow increases the pale daylight, and
brings all objects nearer the eye. The Pentlands are smooth and
glittering, with here and there the black ribbon of a dry-stone dyke,
and here and there, if there be wind, a cloud of blowing snow upon a
shoulder. The Firth seems a leaden creek, that a man might almost jump
across, between well-powdered Lothian and well-powdered Fife. And the
effect is not, as in other cities, a thing of half a day; the streets
are soon trodden black, but the country keeps its virgin white; and you
have only to lift your eyes and look over miles of country snow. An
indescribable cheerfulness breathes about the city; and the well-fed
heart sits lightly and beats gaily in the bosom. It is New-year's
weather.

New-year's Day, the great national festival, is a time of family
expansions and of deep carousal. Sometimes, by a sore stroke of fate for
this Calvinistic people, the year's anniversary falls upon a Sunday,
when the public-houses are inexorably closed, when singing and even
whistling is banished from our homes and highways, and the oldest toper
feels called upon to go to church. Thus pulled about, as if between two
loyalties, the Scots have to decide many nice cases of conscience, and
ride the marches narrowly between the weekly and the annual observance.
A party of convivial musicians, next door to a friend of mine, hung
suspended in this manner on the brink of their diversions. From ten
o'clock on Sunday night, my friend heard them tuning their instruments;
and as the hour of liberty drew near, each must have had his music open,
his bow in readiness across the fiddle, his foot already raised to mark
the time, and his nerves braced for execution; for hardly had the
twelfth stroke sounded from the earliest steeple, before they had
launched forth into a secular bravura.

Currant-loaf is now popular eating in all households. For weeks before
the great morning, confectioners display stacks of Scots bun--a dense,
black substance, inimical to life--and full moons of shortbread adorned
with mottoes of peel or sugar-plum, in honour of the season and the
family affections. "Frae Auld Reekie," "A guid New Year to ye a'," "For
the Auld Folk at Hame," are among the most favoured of these devices.
Can you not see the carrier, after half-a-day's journey on pinching
hill-roads, draw up before a cottage in Teviotdale, or perhaps in Manor
Glen among the rowans, and the old people receiving the parcel with
moist eyes and a prayer for Jock or Jean in the city? For at this
season, on the threshold of another year of calamity and stubborn
conflict, men feel a need to draw closer the links that unite them; they
reckon the number of their friends, like allies before a war; and the
prayers grow longer in the morning as the absent are recommended by name
into God's keeping.

On the day itself, the shops are all shut as on a Sunday; only taverns,
toyshops, and other holiday magazines, keep open doors. Everyone looks
for his handsel. The postmen and the lamplighters have left, at every
house in their districts, a copy of vernacular verses, asking and
thanking in a breath; and it is characteristic of Scotland that these
verses may have sometimes a touch of reality in detail of sentiment and
a measure of strength in the handling. All over the town, you may see
comforter'd schoolboys hastening to squander their half-crowns. There
are an infinity of visits to be paid; all the world is in the street,
except the daintier classes; the sacramental greeting is heard upon all
sides; Auld Lang Syne is much in people's mouths; and whisky and
shortbread are staple articles of consumption. From an early hour a
stranger will be impressed by the number of drunken men; and by
afternoon drunkenness has spread to the women. With some classes of
society, it is as much a matter of duty to drink hard on New-year's Day
as to go to church on Sunday. Some have been saving their wages for
perhaps a month to do the season honour. Many carry a whisky-bottle in
their pocket, which they will press with embarrassing effusion on a
perfect stranger. It is not expedient to risk one's body in a cab, or
not, at least, until after a prolonged study of the driver. The streets,
which are thronged from end to end, become a place for delicate
pilotage. Singly or arm-in-arm, some speechless, others noisy and
quarrelsome, the votaries of the New Year go meandering in and out and
cannoning one against another; and now and again, one falls, and lies as
he has fallen. Before night, so many have gone to bed or the police
office, that the streets seem almost clearer. And as _guisards_ and
_first-footers_ are now not much seen except in country places, when
once the New Year has been rung in and proclaimed at the Tron railings,
the festivities begin to find their way indoors and something like quiet
returns upon the town. But think, in these piled _lands_, of all the
senseless snorers, all the broken heads and empty pockets!

Of old, Edinburgh University was the scene of heroic snowballing; and
one riot obtained the epic honours of military intervention. But the
great generation, I am afraid, is at an end; and even during my own
college days, the spirit appreciably declined. Skating and sliding, on
the other hand, are honoured more and more; and curling, being a
creature of the national genius, is little likely to be disregarded. The
patriotism that leads a man to eat Scots bun will scarcely desert him at
the curling pond. Edinburgh, with its long, steep pavements, is the
proper home of sliders; many a happy urchin can slide the whole way to
school; and the profession of errand-boy is transformed into a holiday
amusement. As for skating, there is scarce any city so handsomely
provided. Duddingston Loch lies under the abrupt southern side of
Arthur's Seat; in summer, a shield of blue, with swans sailing from the
reeds; in winter, a field of ringing ice. The village church sits above
it on a green promontory; and the village smoke rises from among goodly
trees. At the church gates is the historical _jougs_, a place of penance
for the neck of detected sinners, and the historical _louping-on stane_,
from which Dutch-built lairds and farmers climbed into the saddle. Here
Prince Charlie slept before the battle of Prestonpans; and here Deacon
Brodie, or one of his gang, stole a plough coulter before the burglary
in Chessel's Court. On the opposite side of the loch, the ground rises
to Craigmillar Castle, a place friendly to Stuart Mariolaters. It is
worth a climb, even in summer, to look down upon the loch from Arthur's
Seat; but it is tenfold more so on a day of skating. The surface is
thick with people moving easily and swiftly and leaning over at a
thousand graceful inclinations; the crowd opens and closes, and keeps
moving through itself like water; and the ice rings to half a mile away,
with the flying steel. As night draws on, the single figures melt into
the dusk, until only an obscure stir and coming and going of black
clusters is visible upon the loch. A little longer, and the first torch
is kindled and begins to flit rapidly across the ice in a ring of yellow
reflection, and this is followed by another and another, until the whole
field is full of skimming lights.




CHAPTER X

TO THE PENTLAND HILLS


On three sides of Edinburgh, the country slopes downward from the city,
here to the sea, there to the fat farms of Haddington, there to the
mineral fields of Linlithgow. On the south alone, it keeps rising, until
it not only out-tops the Castle, but looks down on Arthur's Seat. The
character of the neighbourhood is pretty strongly marked by a scarcity
of hedges; by many stone walls of varying height; by a fair amount of
timber, some of it well grown, but apt to be of a bushy, northern
profile and poor in foliage; by here and there a little river, Esk or
Leith or Almond, busily journeying in the bottom of its glen; and from
almost every point, by a peep of the sea or the hills. There is no lack
of variety, and yet most of the elements are common to all parts; and
the southern district is alone distinguished by considerable summits and
a wide view.

From Boroughmuirhead, where the Scottish army encamped before Flodden,
the road descends a long hill, at the bottom of which, and just as it is
preparing to mount up on the other side, it passes a toll-bar and issues
at once into the open country. Even as I write these words, they are
becoming antiquated in the progress of events, and the chisels are
tinkling on a new row of houses. The builders have at length adventured
beyond the toll which held them in respect so long, and proceed to
career in these fresh pastures like a herd of colts turned loose. As
Lord Beaconsfield proposed to hang an architect by way of stimulation, a
man, looking on these doomed meads, imagines a similar example to deter
the builders; for it seems as if it must come to an open fight at last
to preserve a corner of green country unbedevilled. And here,
appropriately enough, there stood in old days a crow-haunted gibbet,
with two bodies hanged in chains. I used to be shown, when a child, a
flat stone in the roadway to which the gibbet had been fixed. People of
a willing fancy were persuaded, and sought to persuade others, that this
stone was never dry. And no wonder, they would add, for the two men had
only stolen fourpence between them.

For about two miles the road climbs upwards, a long hot walk in summer
time. You reach the summit at a place where four ways meet, beside the
toll of Fairmilehead. The spot is breezy and agreeable both in name and
aspect. The hills are close by across a valley: Kirk Yetton, with its
long, upright scars visible as far as Fife, and Allermuir the tallest on
this side: with wood and tilled field running high up on their borders,
and haunches all moulded into innumerable glens and shelvings and
variegated with heather and fern. The air comes briskly and sweetly off
the hills, pure from the elevation, and rustically scented by the upland
plants; and even at the toll, you may hear the curlew calling on its
mate. At certain seasons, when the gulls desert their surfy forelands,
the birds of sea and mountain hunt and scream together in the same field
by Fairmilehead. The winged, wild things intermix their wheelings, the
sea-birds skim the tree-tops and fish among the furrows of the plough.
These little craft of air are at home in all the world, so long as they
cruise in their own element; and like sailors, ask but food and water
from the shores they coast.

Below, over a stream, the road passes Bow Bridge, now a dairy-farm, but
once a distillery of whisky. It chanced, some time in the past century,
that the distiller was on terms of good-fellowship with the visiting
officer of excise. The latter was of an easy, friendly disposition, and
a master of convivial arts. Now and again, he had to walk out of
Edinburgh to measure the distiller's stock; and although it was
agreeable to find his business lead him in a friend's direction, it was
unfortunate that the friend should be a loser by his visits.
Accordingly, when he got about the level of Fairmilehead, the gauger
would take his flute, without which he never travelled, from his pocket,
fit it together, and set manfully to playing, as if for his own
delectation and inspired by the beauty of the scene. His favourite air,
it seems, was "Over the Hills and Far Away." At the first note, the
distiller pricked his ears. A flute at Fairmilehead? and playing, "Over
the Hills and Far Away"? This must be his friendly enemy, the gauger.
Instantly, horses were harnessed, and sundry barrels of whisky were got
upon a cart, driven at a gallop round Hill End, and buried in the mossy
glen behind Kirk Yetton. In the same breath, you may be sure, a fat fowl
was put to the fire, and the whitest napery prepared for the back
parlour. A little after, the gauger, having had his fill of music for
the moment, came strolling down with the most innocent air imaginable,
and found the good people at Bow Bridge taken entirely unawares by his
arrival, but none the less glad to see him. The distiller's liquor and
the gauger's flute would combine to speed the moments of digestion; and
when both were somewhat mellow, they would wind up the evening with
"Over the Hills and Far Away," to an accompaniment of knowing glances.
And at least there is a smuggling story, with original and half-idyllic
features.

A little farther, the road to the right passes an upright stone in a
field. The country people call it General Kay's monument. According to
them, an officer of that name had perished there in battle at some
indistinct period before the beginning of history. The date is
reassuring; for I think cautious writers are silent on the General's
exploits. But the stone is connected with one of those remarkable
tenures of land which linger on into the modern world from Feudalism.
Whenever the reigning sovereign passes by, a certain landed proprietor
is held bound to climb on to the top, trumpet in hand, and sound a
flourish according to the measure of his knowledge in that art. Happily
for a respectable family, crowned heads have no great business in the
Pentland Hills. But the story lends a character of comicality to the
stone; and the passer-by will sometimes chuckle to himself.

The district is dear to the superstitious. Hard by, at the back-gate of
Comiston, a belated carter beheld a lady in white, "with the most
beautiful, clear shoes upon her feet," who looked upon him in a very
ghastly manner, and then vanished; and just in front is the Hunters'
Tryst, once a roadside inn, and not so long ago haunted by the devil in
person. Satan led the inhabitants a pitiful existence. He shook the four
corners of the building with lamentable outcries, beat at the doors and
windows, over-threw crockery in the dead hours of the morning, and
danced unholy dances on the roof. Every kind of spiritual disinfectant
was put in requisition; chosen ministers were summoned out of Edinburgh
and prayed by the hour; pious neighbours sat up all night making a noise
of psalmody; but Satan minded them no more than the wind about the
hill-tops; and it was only after years of persecution, that he left the
Hunters' Tryst in peace to occupy himself with the remainder of mankind.
What with General Kay, and the white lady, and this singular visitation,
the neighbourhood offers great facilities to the makers of sun-myths;
and without exactly casting in one's lot with that disenchanting school
of writers, one cannot help hearing a good deal of the winter wind in
the last story. "That nicht," says Burns, in one of his happiest
moments,--

    "That nicht a child might understand
    The deil had business on his hand."

And if people sit up all night in lone places on the hills, with Bibles
and tremulous psalms, they will be apt to hear some of the most
fiendish noises in the world: the wind will beat on doors and dance upon
roofs for them, and make the hills howl around their cottage with a
clamour like the Judgment Day.

The road goes down through another valley, and then finally begins to
scale the main slope of the Pentlands. A bouquet of old trees stands
round a white farmhouse; and from a neighbouring dell, you can see smoke
rising and leaves ruffling in the breeze. Straight above, the hills
climb a thousand feet into the air. The neighbourhood, about the time of
lambs, is clamorous with the bleating of flocks; and you will be
awakened, in the grey of early summer mornings, by the barking of a dog
or the voice of a shepherd shouting to the echoes. This, with the hamlet
lying behind unseen, is Swanston.

The place in the dell is immediately connected with the city. Long ago,
this sheltered field was purchased by the Edinburgh magistrates for the
sake of the springs that rise or gather there. After they had built
their water-house and laid their pipes, it occurred to them that the
place was suitable for junketing. Once entertained, with jovial
magistrates and public funds, the idea led speedily to accomplishment;
and Edinburgh could soon boast of a municipal Pleasure House. The dell
was turned into a garden; and on the knoll that shelters it from the
plain and the sea winds, they built a cottage looking to the hills. They
brought crockets and gargoyles from old St. Giles's, which they were
then restoring, and disposed them on the gables and over the door and
about the garden; and the quarry which had supplied them with building
material, they draped with clematis and carpeted with beds of roses. So
much for the pleasure of the eye; for creature comfort, they made a
capacious cellar in the hillside and fitted it with bins of the hewn
stone. In process of time, the trees grew higher and gave shade to the
cottage, and the evergreens sprang up and turned the dell into a
thicket. There, purple magistrates relaxed themselves from the pursuit
of municipal ambition; cocked hats paraded soberly about the garden and
in and out among the hollies; authoritative canes drew ciphering upon
the path; and at night, from high up on the hills, a shepherd saw
lighted windows through the foliage and heard the voice of city
dignitaries raised in song.

The farm is older. It was first a grange of Whitekirk Abbey, tilled and
inhabited by rosy friars. Thence, after the Reformation, it passed into
the hands of a true-blue Protestant family. During the Covenanting
troubles, when a night conventicle was held upon the Pentlands, the farm
doors stood hospitably open till the morning; the dresser was laden with
cheese and bannocks, milk and brandy; and the worshipers kept lipping
down from the hill between two exercises, as couples visit the
supper-room between two dances of a modern ball. In the Forty-Five, some
foraging Highlanders from Prince Charlie's army fell upon Swanston in
the dawn. The great-grandfather of the late farmer was then a little
child; him they awakened by plucking the blankets from his bed, and he
remembered, when he was an old man, their truculent looks and uncouth
speech. The churn stood full of cream in the dairy, and with this they
made their brose in high delight. "It was braw brose," said one of them.
At last they made off, laden like camels with their booty; and Swanston
Farm has lain out of the way of history from that time forward. I do not
know what may be yet in store for it. On dark days, when the mist runs
low upon the hill, the house has a gloomy air as if suitable for private
tragedy. But in hot July, you can fancy nothing more perfect than the
garden, laid out in alleys and arbours and bright, old-fashioned
flower-plots, and ending in a miniature ravine, all trellis-work and
moss and tinkling waterfall, and housed from the sun under fathoms of
broad foliage.

The hamlet behind is one of the least considerable of hamlets, and
consists of a few cottages on a green beside a burn. Some of them (a
strange thing in Scotland) are models of internal neatness; the beds
adorned with patchwork, the shelves arrayed with willow-pattern plates,
the floors and tables bright with scrubbing or pipeclay, and the very
kettle polished like silver. It is the sign of a contented old age in
country places, where there is little matter for gossip and no street
sights. Housework becomes an art; and at evening, when the cottage
interior shines and twinkles in the glow of the fire, the housewife
folds her hands and contemplates her finished picture; the snow and the
wind may do their worst, she has made herself a pleasant corner in the
world. The city might be a thousand miles away: and yet it was close by
that Mr. Bough painted the distant view of Edinburgh which has been
engraved for this collection:[2] and you have only to look at the cut,
to see how near it is at hand. But hills and hill people are not easily
sophisticated; and if you walk out here on a summer Sunday, it is as
like as not the shepherd may set his dogs upon you. But keep an unmoved
countenance; they look formidable at the charge, but their hearts are in
the right place; and they will only bark and sprawl about you on the
grass, unmindful of their master's excitations.

Kirk Yetton forms the north-eastern angle of the range; thence, the
Pentlands trend off to south and west. From the summit you look over a
great expanse of champaign sloping to the sea and behold a large variety
of distant hills. There are the hills of Fife, the hills of Peebles, the
Lammermoors, and the Ochils, more or less mountainous in outline, more
or less blue with distance. Of the Pentlands themselves, you see a field
of wild heathery peaks with a pond gleaming in the midst; and to that
side the view is as desolate as if you were looking into Galloway or
Applecross. To turn to the other, is like a piece of travel. Far out in
the lowlands Edinburgh shows herself, making a great smoke on clear
days and spreading her suburbs about her for miles; the Castle rises
darkly in the midst; and close by, Arthur's Seat makes a bold figure in
the landscape. All around, cultivated fields, and woods, and smoking
villages, and white country roads, diversify the uneven surface of the
land. Trains crawl slowly abroad upon the railway lines; little ships
are tacking in the Firth; the shadow of a mountainous cloud, as large as
a parish, travels before the wind; the wind itself ruffles the wood and
standing corn, and sends pulses of varying colour across the landscape.
So you sit, like Jupiter on Olympus, and look down from afar upon men's
life. The city is as silent as a city of the dead: from all its humming
thoroughfares, not a voice, not a footfall, reaches you upon the hill.
The sea surf, the cries of ploughmen, the streams and the mill-wheels,
the birds and the wind, keep up an animated concert through the plain;
from farm to farm, dogs and crowing cocks contend together in defiance;
and yet from this Olympian station, except for the whispering rumour of
a train, the world has fallen into a dead silence and the business of
town and country grown voiceless in your ears. A crying hill-bird, the
bleat of a sheep, a wind singing in the dry grass, seem not so much to
interrupt, as to accompany, the stillness; but to the spiritual ear, the
whole scene makes a music at once human and rural, and discourses
pleasant reflections on the destiny of man. The spiry habitable city,
ships, the divided fields, and browsing herds, and the straight
highways, tell visibly of man's active and comfortable ways; and you may
be never so laggard and never so unimpressionable, but there is
something in the view that spirits up your blood and puts you in the
vein for cheerful labour.

Immediately below is Fairmilehead, a spot of roof and a smoking chimney,
where two roads, no thicker than packthread, intersect beside a hanging
wood. If you are fanciful, you will be reminded of the gauger in the
story. And the thought of this old exciseman, who once lipped and
fingered on his pipe and uttered clear notes from it in the mountain
air, and the words of the song he affected, carry your mind "Over the
hills and far away" to distant countries; and you have a vision of
Edinburgh not, as you see her, in the midst of a little neighbourhood,
but as a boss upon the round world with all Europe and the deep sea for
her surroundings. For every place is a centre to the earth, whence
highways radiate or ships set sail for foreign ports; the limit of a
parish is not more imaginary than the frontier of an empire; and as a
man sitting at home in his cabinet and swiftly writing books, so a city
sends abroad an influence and a portrait of herself. There is no
Edinburgh emigrant, far or near, from China to Peru, but he or she
carries some lively pictures of the mind, some sunset behind the Castle
cliffs, some snow scene, some maze of city lamps, indelible in the
memory and delightful to study in the intervals of toil. For any such,
if this book fall in their way, here are a few more home pictures. It
would be pleasant if they should recognise a house where they had dwelt,
or a walk that they had taken.

[2] Reference to an etching in original edition.

END OF VOL. I.