floors were pushed out on timber brackets for light and air.
Galleries, stairs and jutting windows were added to outer walls, and the
mansions climbed, story above story, until the Cowgate was an undercut
canon, such as is worn through rock by the rivers of western America.
Lairds and leddies, powdered, jeweled and satin-shod, were borne in
sedan chairs down ten flights of stone stairs and through torch-lit
courts and tunnel streets, to routs in Castle or Palace and to tourneys
in the Grassmarket.

From its low situation the Cowgate came in the course of time to smell
to heaven, and out of it was a sudden exodus of grand folk to the
northern hills. The lowest level was given over at once to the poor and
to small trade. The wynds and closes that climbed the southern slope
were eagerly possessed by divines, lawyers and literary men because of
their nearness to the University. Long before Bobby's day the well-to-do
had fled from the Cowgate wynds to the hilltop streets and open squares
about the colleges. A few decent working-men remained in the decaying
houses, some of which were at least three centuries old. But there
swarmed in upon, and submerged them, thousands of criminals, beggars,
and the miserably poor and degraded of many nationalities. Businesses
that fatten on misfortune--the saloon, pawn, old clothes and cheap food
shops-lined the squalid Cowgate. Palaces were cut up into honeycombs of
tall tenements. Every stair was a crowded highway; every passage a
place of deposit for filth; almost every room sheltered a half famished
family, in darkness and ancient dirt. Grand and great, pious and wise,
decent, wretched and terrible folk, of every sort, had preceded Auld
Jock to his lodging in a steep and narrow wynd, and nine gusty flights
up under a beautiful, old Gothic gable.

A wrought-iron lantern hanging in an arched opening, lighted the
entrance to the wynd. With a hand outstretched to either wall, Auld Jock
felt his way up. Another lantern marked a sculptured doorway that gave
to the foul court of the tenement. No sky could be seen above the open
well of the court, and the carved, oaken banister of the stairs had
to be felt for and clung to by one so short of breath. On the seventh
landing, from the exertion of the long climb, Auld Jock was shaken
into helplessness, and his heart set to pounding, by a violent fit of
coughing. Overhead a shutter was slammed back, and an angry voice bade
him stop "deaving folk."