he freshness, and that touch of chill, peculiar to the
quarter, which is delightful to certain very ruddy organizations and
greatly the reverse to the majority of mankind. It brings with it a
faint, floating haze, a cunning decolouriser, although not thick enough
to obscure outlines near at hand. But the haze lies more thickly to
windward at the far end of Musselburgh Bay; and over the Links of
Aberlady and Berwick Law and the hump of the Bass Rock it assumes the
aspect of a bank of thin sea fog.

Immediately underneath upon the south, you command the yards of the High
School, and the towers and courts of the new Jail--a large place,
castellated to the extent of folly, standing by itself on the edge of a
steep cliff, and often joyfully hailed by tourists as the Castle. In the
one, you may perhaps see female prisoners taking exercise like a string
of nuns; in the other, schoolboys running at play and their shadows
keeping step with them. From the bottom of the valley, a gigantic
chimney rises almost to the level of the eye, a taller and a shapelier
edifice than Nelson's Monument. Look a little farther, and there is
Holyrood Palace, with its Gothic frontal and ruined abbey, and the red
sentry pacing smartly to and fro before the door like a mechanical
figure in a panorama. By way of an outpost, you can single out the
little peak-roofed lodge, over which Rizzio's murderers made their
escape, and where Queen Mary herself, according to gossip, bathed in
white wine to entertain her loveliness. Behind and overhead, lie the
Queen's Park, from Muschat's Cairn to Dumbiedykes, St. Margaret's Loch,
and the long wall of Salisbury Crags; and thence, by knoll and rocky
bulwark and precipitous slope, the eye rises to the top of Arthur's
Seat, a hill for magnitude, a mountain in virtue of its bold design.
This upon your left. Upon the right, the roofs and spires of the Old
Town climb one above another to where the citadel prints its broad bulk
and jagged crown of bastions on the western sky.--Perhaps it is now one
in the afternoon; and at the same instant of time, a ball rises to the
summit of Nelson's flagstaff close at hand, and, far away, a puff of
smoke followed by a report bursts from the half-moon battery at the
Castle. This is the time-gun by which people set their watches, as far
as the sea coast or in hill farms upon the Pentlands.--To complete the
view, the eye enfilades Princes Street, black with traffic, and has a
broad look