ad succeeded in rescuing from his burning dwelling,
was emerging from one of the lanes, followed by his wife, when, striking
his foot against some obstacle in the way, or staggering from the too
great weight of his load, he tottered against a projecting corner, and
the glazed door was driven in with a crash. There was hopeless misery in
the wailing cry of his wife--"Oh, ruin, ruin!--_it's_ lost too!" Nor was
his own despairing response less sad:--"Ay, ay, puir lassie, its a' at
an end noo." Curious as it may seem, the wild excitement of the scene
had at first rather exhilarated than depressed my spirits; but the
incident of the glass cupboard served to awaken the proper feeling; and
as I came more into contact with the misery of the catastrophe, and
marked the groups of shivering houseless creatures that watched beside
the broken fragments of their stuff, I saw what a dire calamity a great
fire really is. Nearly two hundred families were already at this time
cast homeless into the streets. Shortly before quitting the scene of
the conflagration for the country, I passed along a common stair, which
led from the Parliament Close towards the Cowgate, through a tall old
domicile, eleven stories in height, and I afterwards remembered that the
passage was occupied by a smouldering oppressive vapour, which, from the
direction of the wind, could scarce have been derived from the adjacent
conflagration, though at the time, without thinking much of the
circumstance, I concluded it might have come creeping westwards on some
low cross current along the narrow lanes. In less than an hour after
that lofty tenement was wrapt in flames, from the ground story to more
than a hundred feet over its tallest chimneys, and about sixty
additional families, its tenants, were cast into the streets with the
others. My friend William Ross afterwards assured me, that never had he
witnessed anything equal in grandeur to this last of the conflagrations.
Directly over the sea of fire below, the low-browed clouds above seemed
as if charged with a sea of blood, that lightened and darkened by fits
as the flames rose and fell; and far and wide, tower and spire, and tall
house-top, glared out against a background of darkness, as if they had
been brought to a red heat by some great subterranean, earth-born fire,
that was fast rising to wrap the entire city in destruction. The old
church of St. Giles, he said, with the fantastic masonry of its pale
grey tower,