and you may
be never so laggard and never so unimpressionable, but there is
something in the view that spirits up your blood and puts you in the
vein for cheerful labour.

Immediately below is Fairmilehead, a spot of roof and a smoking chimney,
where two roads, no thicker than packthread, intersect beside a hanging
wood. If you are fanciful, you will be reminded of the gauger in the
story. And the thought of this old exciseman, who once lipped and
fingered on his pipe and uttered clear notes from it in the mountain
air, and the words of the song he affected, carry your mind "Over the
hills and far away" to distant countries; and you have a vision of
Edinburgh not, as you see her, in the midst of a little neighbourhood,
but as a boss upon the round world with all Europe and the deep sea for
her surroundings. For every place is a centre to the earth, whence
highways radiate or ships set sail for foreign ports; the limit of a
parish is not more imaginary than the frontier of an empire; and as a
man sitting at home in his cabinet and swiftly writing books, so a city
sends abroad an influence and a portrait of herself. There is no
Edinburgh emigrant, far or near, from China to Peru, but he or she
carries some lively pictures of the mind, some sunset behind the Castle
cliffs, some snow scene, some maze of city lamps, indelible in the
memory and delightful to study in the intervals of toil. For any such,
if this book fall in their way, here are a few more home pictures. It
would be pleasant if they should recognise a house where they had dwelt,
or a walk that they had taken.

[2] Reference to an etching in original edition.

END OF VOL. I.

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Swanston Edition, by Robert Louis Stevenson

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