ily keekit ben;
Rattlin', roarin' Willie
Was sitting at yon boord en';
Sitting at yon boord en',
And amang guid companie!
Rattlin', roarin' Willie,
Ye're welcome hame to me!'

or in the verses on Creech, Burns's publisher, who left Edinburgh for a
time in 1789. The 'Willies,' by the way, seem to be especially inspiring
to the Scottish balladists.

'Oh, Willie was a witty wight,
And had o' things an unco slight!
Auld Reekie aye he keepit tight
And trig and braw;
But now they'll busk her like a fright--
Willie's awa'!'

I think perhaps the gatherings of the present time are neither quite as
gay nor quite as brilliant as those of Burns's day, when

'Willie brewed a peck o' maut,
An' Rob an' Allan cam to pree';

but the ideal standard of those meetings seems to be voiced in the
lines:--

'Wha last beside his chair shall fa',
He is the king amang us three!'

As they sit in their chairs nowadays to the very end of the feast, there
is doubtless joined with modern sobriety a soupcon of modern dulness and
discretion.

To an American the great charm of Edinburgh is its leisurely atmosphere:
'not the leisure of a village arising from the deficiency of ideas and
motives, but the leisure of a city reposing grandly on tradition and
history; which has done its work, and does not require to weave its own
clothing, to dig its own coals, or smelt its own iron.'

We were reminded of this more than once, and it never failed to depress
us properly. If one had ever lived in Pittsburg, Fall River, or
Kansas City, I should think it would be almost impossible to maintain
self-respect in a place like Edinburgh, where the citizens 'are released
from the vulgarising dominion of the hour.' Whenever one of Auld
Reekie's great men took this tone with me, I always felt as though I
were the germ in a half-hatched egg, and he were an aged and lordly cock
gazing at me pityingly through my shell. He, lucky creature, had lived
through all the struggles which I was to undergo; he, indeed, was
released from 'the vulgarising dominion of the hour'; but I, poor thing,
must grow and grow, and keep pecking at my shell, in order to achieve
existence.

Sydney Smith says in one of his letters, 'Never shall I forget the
happy days passed there [in Edinburgh], amidst odious smells, barbarous
sounds, bad suppers, excellent hearts, and the most enlightened and
cultivated understandings.' His only