Non-Fiction > Books > London, 1879 - Edinburgh

The Calton Hill.
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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
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queen mary's bath.
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 Prince's Street, black with traffic, and has a broad look
over the valley between the Old Town and the New : here, full of railway trains and
stepped over by the high North Bridge upon its many columns, and there, green with trees
and gardens.
On the north, the Calton Hill is neither so abrupt in itself nor has it so exceptional
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