et were events
of this winter. A countryman, who had left town when the old spire of
the Tron Church was blazing like a torch, and the large group of
buildings nearly opposite the Cross still enveloped in flame from
ground-floor to roof-tree, passed our work-shed, a little after two
o'clock, and, telling us what he had seen, remarked that, if the
conflagration went on as it was doing, we would have, as our next
season's employment, the Old Town of Edinburgh to rebuild. And as the
evening closed over our labours, we went in to town in a body, to see
the fires that promised to do so much for us. The spire had burnt out,
and we could but catch between us and the darkened sky, the square
abrupt outline of the masonry a-top that had supported the wooden
broach, whence, only a few hours before, Fergusson's bell had descended
in a molten shower. The flames, too, in the upper group of buildings,
were restricted to the lower stories, and flared fitfully on the tall
forms and bright swords of the dragoons, drawn from the neighbouring
barracks, as they rode up and down the middle space, or gleamed athwart
the street on groups of wretched-looking women and ruffian men, who
seemed scanning with greedy eyes the still unremoved heaps of household
goods rescued from the burning tenements. The first figure that caught
my eye was a singularly ludicrous one. Removed from the burning mass but
by the thickness of a wall, there was a barber's shop brilliantly
lighted with gas, the uncurtained window of which permitted the
spectators outside to see whatever was going on in the interior. The
barber was as busily at work as if he were a hundred miles from the
scene of danger, though the engines at the time were playing against the
outside of his gable wall; and the immediate subject under his hands, as
my eye rested upon him, was an immensely fat old fellow, on whose round
bald forehead and ruddy cheeks the perspiration, occasioned by the
oven-like heat of the place, was standing out in huge drops, and whose
vast mouth, widely opened to accommodate the man of the razor, gave to
his countenance such an expression as I have sometimes seen in grotesque
Gothic heads of that age of art in which the ecclesiastical architect
began to make sport of his religion. The next object that presented
itself was, however, of a more sobering description. A poor working man,
laden with his favourite piece of furniture, a glass-fronted press or
cupboard, which he h