lways in the reactionary state of
unhappiness which succeeds intoxication--(they themselves used to term
it "_the horrors_")--and with their nervous system so shaken, that
rarely until a day or two after did they recover their ordinary working
ability. Narratives of their adventures, however, would then begin to
circulate through the squad--adventures commonly of the "Tom and Jerry"
type; and always, the more extravagant they were, the more was the
admiration which they excited. On one occasion, I remember (for it was
much spoken about as a manifestation of high spirit) that three of them,
hiring a coach, drove out on the Sunday to visit Roslin and Hawthornden,
and in this way spent their six pounds so much in the style of
gentlemen, that they were able to get back to the mallet without a
farthing on the evening of Monday. And, as they were at work on Tuesday
in consequence, they succeeded, as they said, in saving the wages of a
day usually lost, just by doing the thing so genteelly. Edinburgh had in
those times a not very efficient police, and, in some of its less
reputable localities, must have been dangerous. Burke found its West
Port a fitting scene for his horrid trade a good many years after; and
from the stories of some of our bolder spirits, which, though mayhap
exaggerated, had evidently their nucleus of truth, there was not a
little of the violent and the lawless perpetrated in its viler haunts
during the years of the speculation mania. Four of our masons found, one
Saturday evening, a country lad bound hand and foot on the floor of a
dark inner room in one of the dens of the High Street; and such was the
state of exhaustion to which he was reduced, mainly through the
compression of an old apron wrapped tightly round his face, that though
they set him loose, it was some time ere he could muster strength enough
to crawl away. He had been robbed by a bevy of women whom he had been
foolish enough to treat; and on threatening to call in the watchman,
they had fallen upon a way of keeping him quiet, which, save for the
interference of my wild fellow-workmen, would soon have rendered him
permanently so. And such was but one of many stories of the kind.

There was of course a considerable diversity of talent and acquirement
among my more reckless associates at the work; and it was curious enough
to mark their very various views regarding what constituted spirit or
the want of it. One weak lad used to tell us about a s