Collected works > Edinburgh edition, 1894-98 - Works of Robert Louis Stevenson > Volume 1, 1894 - Miscellanies, Volume I

THE CALTON HILL
colouriser, although not thick enough to obscure
outhnes near at hand. But the haze Hes 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 foll}?^, 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 Bizzio's murderers made their
escape, and where Queen Mary herself, according to
gossip, bathed in white wine to entertain her loveli-
ness. Behind and overhead, lie the Queen's Park,
from Muschat's Cairn to Dumbiedykes, St. Mar-
garet's Loch, and the long wall of Salisbury Crags ;
and thence, by knoll and rocky bulwark and precipi-
tous slope, the eye rises to the top of Arthur's Seat,
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