ich is a great drawback--the horrid jargon which they speak. However
learned they may be in Greek and Latin, their English is execrable; and
yet I'm told it is not so bad as it was. I was in company the other day
with an Englishman who has resided here many years. We were talking
about the country and the people. 'I should like both very well,' said
I, 'were it not for the language. I wish sincerely our Parliament, which
is passing so many foolish acts every year, would pass one to force these
Scotch to speak English.' 'I wish so, too,' said he. 'The language is a
disgrace to the British Government; but, if you had heard it twenty years
ago, captain!--if you had heard it as it was spoken when I first came to
Edinburgh!'"

"Only custom," said my mother. "I dare say the language is now what it
was then."

"I don't know," said my father; "though I dare say you are right; it
could never have been worse than it is at present. But now to the point.
Were it not for the language, which, if the boys were to pick it up,
might ruin their prospects in life,--were it not for that, I should very
much like to send them to a school there is in this place, which
everybody talks about--the High School, I think they call it. 'Tis said
to be the best school in the whole island; but the idea of one's children
speaking Scotch--broad Scotch! I must think the matter over."

And he did think the matter over; and the result of his deliberation was
a determination to send us to the school. Let me call thee up before my
mind's eye, High School, to which, every morning, the two English
brothers took their way from the proud old Castle through the lofty
streets of the Old Town. High School!--called so, I scarcely know why;
neither lofty in thyself nor by position, being situated in a flat
bottom; oblong structure of tawny stone, with many windows fenced with
iron netting--with thy long hall below, and thy five chambers above, for
the reception of the five classes, into which the eight hundred urchins,
who styled thee instructress, were divided. Thy learned rector and his
four subordinate dominies; thy strange old porter of the tall form and
grizzled hair, hight Boee, and doubtless of Norse ancestry, as his name
declares; perhaps of the blood of Bui hin Digri, the hero of northern
song--the Jomsborg Viking who clove Thorsteinn Midlaagr asunder in the
dread sea battle of Horunga Vog, and who, when the fight was lost and his
own two han