n
each side, for banks, and a current of men, women, and children flowing
along, instead of water.

The different portions of the lower town, on the other hand, are
connected by tunnels and arched passage ways under the bridges above
described; and then there are flights of steps, and steep winding or
zigzag paths, leading up and down between the lower streets and the
upper, in the most surprising manner.

There are twenty places, more or less, in the town, where you have two
streets crossing each other at right angles, one fifty feet below the
other, with an immense traffic of horses, carriages, carts, and foot
passengers, going to and fro in both of them. You come upon these places
sometimes very unexpectedly. You are walking along on the pavement of a
crowded street, when you come suddenly upon the break, or interruption
in the line of building on each side. The space is occupied by a
parapet, or by a high iron balustrade. You stop to look over, expecting
to see a river or a canal; instead of which, you find yourself looking
down into the chimneys of four-story houses bordering another street
below you, which is so far down that the people walking in it, and the
children playing on the sidewalk, look like pygmies.

At one place, in looking over the parapet of such a bridge, you see a
vast market, with carts filled with vegetables standing all around it.
At another, you behold a great railway station, with crowds of
passengers on the platforms, and trains of cars coming and going; at
another, a range of beautiful gardens and pleasure grounds, with ladies
and gentlemen walking in them, or sitting on seats under the trees, and
children trundling their hoops, or rolling their balls, over the smooth
gravel walks.

Sometimes a street of the upper town, running along on the crest or side
of a hill, lies _parallel_ with one in the lower town, that extends
below it in the valley. In this case the block of houses that comes
between will be very high indeed on the side towards the lower street;
so that you see buildings sometimes eight or ten stories high at one
front, and only four or five on the other. These structures consist, in
fact, of two houses, one on top of the other; the entrances to the lower
house being from one of the streets of the lower town, and those leading
to the one on the top being from a street in the upper town.

The reason why Edinburgh was built in this extraordinary position was,
because it had