of the
most commodious streets and crescents in the modern city; and a handsome
bridge unites the two summits. Over this, every afternoon, private
carriages go spinning by, and ladies with card cases pass to and fro
about the duties of society. And yet down below, you may still see, with
its mills and foaming weir, the little rural village of Dean. Modern
improvement has gone overhead on its high-level viaduct; and the
extended city has cleanly overleapt, and left unaltered, what was once
the summer retreat of its comfortable citizens. Every town embraces
hamlets in its growth; Edinburgh herself has embraced a good few; but it
is strange to see one still surviving--and to see it some hundreds of
feet below your path. Is it Torre del Greco that is built above buried
Herculaneum? Herculaneum was dead at least; but the sun still shines
upon the roofs of Dean; the smoke still rises thriftily from its
chimneys; the dusty miller comes to his door, looks at the gurgling
water, hearkens to the turning wheel and the birds about the shed, and
perhaps whistles an air of his own to enrich the symphony--for all the
world as if Edinburgh were still the old Edinburgh on the Castle Hill,
and Dean were still the quietest of hamlets buried a mile or so in the
green country.

It is not so long ago since magisterial David Hume lent the authority of
his example to the exodus from the Old Town, and took up his new abode
in a street which is still (so oddly may a jest become perpetuated)
known as Saint David Street. Nor is the town so large but a holiday
schoolboy may harry a bird's nest within half a mile of his own door.
There are places that still smell of the plough in memory's nostrils.
Here, one had heard a blackbird on a hawthorn; there, another was taken
on summer evenings to eat strawberries and cream; and you have seen a
waving wheatfield on the site of your present residence. The memories of
an Edinburgh boy are but partly memories of the town. I look back with
delight on many an escalade of garden walls; many a ramble among lilacs
full of piping birds; many an exploration in obscure quarters that were
neither town nor country; and I think that both for my companions and
myself, there was a special interest, a point of romance, and a
sentiment as of foreign travel, when we hit in our excursions on the
butt-end of some former hamlet, and found a few rustic cottages embedded
among streets and squares. The tunnel to the Scotland Stre