rin' Willie
Was sitting at yon boord en';
Sitting at yon boord en',
And amang guid companie!
Rattlin', roarin' Willie,
Ye're welcome hame to me!"

or in the verses on Creech, Burns's publisher, who left Edinburgh for
a time in 1789. The "Willies," by the way, seem to be especially
inspiring to the Scottish balladists.

"Oh, Willie was a witty wight,
And had o' things an unco slight!
Auld Reekie aye he keepit tight
And trig and braw;
But now they'll busk her like a fright--
Willie's awa'!"

I think perhaps the gatherings of the present time are neither quite
as gay nor quite as brilliant as those of Burns's day, when

"Willie brewed a peck o' maut,
An' Rob an' Allan cam to pree;"

but the ideal standard of those meetings seems to be voiced in the
lines:--

"Wha last beside his chair shall fa',
He is the king amang us three!"

As they sit in their chairs nowadays to the very end of the feast,
there is doubtless joined with modern sobriety a _soupcon_ of modern
dullness and discretion.

To an American the great charm of Edinburgh is its leisurely
atmosphere: "not the leisure of a village arising from the deficiency
of ideas and motives, but the leisure of a city reposing grandly on
tradition and history; which has done its work, and does not require
to weave its own clothing, to dig its own coals, or smelt its own
iron."

We were reminded of this more than once, and it never failed to
depress us properly. If one had ever lived in Pittsburg, Fall River,
or Kansas City, I should think it would be almost impossible to
maintain self-respect in a place like Edinburgh, where the citizens
"are released from the vulgarizing dominion of the hour." Whenever one
of Auld Reekie's great men took this tone with me, I always felt as
though I were the germ in a half-hatched egg, and he were an aged and
lordly cock gazing at me pityingly through my shell. He, lucky
creature, had lived through all the struggles which I was to undergo;
he, indeed, was released from "the vulgarizing dominion of the hour;"
but I, poor thing, must grow and grow, and keep pecking at my shell,
in order to achieve existence.

Sydney Smith says in one of his letters, "Never shall I forget the
happy days passed there [in Edinburgh], amidst odious smells,
barbarous sounds, bad suppers, excellent hearts, and the most
enlightened and cultivated understandings." His only criticism