Currant-loaf is now popular eating in all house-
holds.  For weeks before the great morning, confectioners 
display stacks of Scotch 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.  Every one looks for his 
handsel.  The postman 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 or sentiment and a 
measure of strength in the handling.  All over the town, 
you may see comforter'd schoolboys hasting 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 inexpedient 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 Scotch bun will scarce 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.  Duddingstone 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 JOUG; 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 upon the other side, it passes a toll-bar and 
issues at once into the open country.  Even as I write 
these words, they are being 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 upon 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 further, 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, overthrew 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 upon 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 worshippers kept slipping 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 pipe-clay, 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 from close by that Mr. Bough painted 
the distant view of Edinburgh which has been engraved for 
this collection; and you have only to look at the 
etching, * 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.

* One of the illustrations of the First Edition.

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 upon 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.