Non-Fiction > Books > London, 1879 - Edinburgh

New Town — Town and Country.
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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 Street Station, the sight of the trains shooting out of its dark maw with the two
guards upon the brake, the thought of its length and the many ponderous edifices and open
thoroughfares above, were certainly things of paramount impressiveness to a young mind. It
IN' THE VILLAGE OF DEAN.
was a subterranean passage, although of a larger bore than we were accustomed to in Ainsworth's
novels ; and these two words, 'subterranean passage,' were in themselves an irresistible attraction,
and seemed to bring us nearer in spirit to the heroes we loved and the black rascals we secretly
aspired to imitate. To scale the Castle Rock from West Prince's Street Gardens, and lay a
triumphal hand against the rampart itself, was to taste a high order of romantic pleasure. And
there are other sights and exploits which crowd back upon my mind under a very strong
illumination of remembered pleasure. But the effect of not one of them all will compare with
the discoverer's joy, and the sense of old Time and his slow changes on the face of this earth,
with which I explored such corners as Cannonmills or Water Lane, or the nugget of cottages at
Rroughton Market. They were more rural than the open country, and gave a greater impression
of antiquity than the oldest land upon the High Street. They too, like Fergusson's butterfly
had a quaint air of having wandered far from their own place ; they looked abashed and
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