of the city stamped in indigo upon a sky of luminous green. The wind may
still be cold, but there is a briskness in the air that stirs good
blood. People do not all look equally sour and downcast. They fall into
two divisions: one, the knight of the blue face and hollow paunch, whom
Winter has gotten by the vitals; the other well lined with New-year's
fare, conscious of the touch of cold on his periphery, but stepping
through it by the glow of his internal fires. Such an one I remember,
triply cased in grease, whom no extremity of temperature could vanquish.
"Well," would be his jovial salutation, "here's a sneezer!" And the look
of these warm fellows is tonic, and upholds their drooping
fellow-townsmen. There is yet another class who do not depend on
corporal advantages, but support the winter in virtue of a brave and
merry heart. One shivering evening, cold enough for frost but with too
high a wind, and a little past sundown, when the lamps were beginning to
enlarge their circles in the growing dusk, a brace of barefoot lassies
were seen coming eastward in the teeth of the wind. If the one was as
much as nine, the other was certainly not more than seven. They were
miserably clad; and the pavement was so cold, you would have thought no
one could lay a naked foot on it unflinching. Yet they came along
waltzing, if you please, while the elder sang a tune to give them music.
The person who saw this, and whose heart was full of bitterness at the
moment, pocketed a reproof which has been of use to him ever since, and
which he now hands on, with his good wishes, to the reader.

At length, Edinburgh, with her satellite hills and all the sloping
country, is sheeted up in white. If it has happened in the dark hours,
nurses pluck their children out of bed and run with them to some
commanding window, whence they may see the change that has been worked
upon earth's face. "A' the hills are covered wi' snaw," they sing, "and
Winter's noo come fairly!" And the children, marveling at the silence
and the white landscape, find a spell appropriate to the season in the
words. The reverberation of the snow increases the pale daylight, and
brings all objects nearer the eye. The Pentlands are smooth and
glittering, with here and there the black ribbon of a dry-stone dyke,
and here and there, if there be wind, a cloud of blowing snow upon a
shoulder. The Firth seems a leaden creek, that a man might almost jump
across, between well-powdered Lo