like stage-scenes perpetually "set" for melodramatic horrors.
The late Dr. Thomas Guthrie, whose parish included a large portion of
this Egypt, used often to illustrate his eloquence with graphic
word-pictures suggested by his experiences in these dark places. "The
unfurnished floor," he writes, "the begrimed and naked walls, the
stifling, sickening atmosphere, the patched and dusty window--through
which a sunbeam, like hope, is faintly stealing--the ragged,
hunger-bitten and sad-faced children, the ruffian man, the heap of straw
where some wretched mother in muttering dreams sleeps off last night's
debauch or lies unshrouded and uncoffined in the ghastliness of a
hopeless death, are sad scenes. We have often looked on them, and they
appear all the sadder for the restless play of fancy excited by some
vestiges of a fresco-painting that still looks out from the foul and
broken plaster, the massive marble rising over the cold and cracked
hearthstone, an elaborately-carved cornice too high for shivering cold
to pull it down for fuel, some stucco flowers or fruit yet pendent on
the crumbling ceiling. Fancy, kindled by these, calls up the gay scenes
and actors of other days, when beauty, elegance and fashion graced these
lonely halls, and plenty smoked on groaning tables, and where these few
cinders, gathered from the city dustheap, are feebly smouldering,
hospitable fires roared up the chimney."

[Illustration: OLD EDINBURGH BY NIGHT.]

These houses are built upon the "flat" system, some of the better ones
having a court in the centre like French houses, and turrets at the
corners for the circular staircases connecting the different flats.
Fires and improvements are rapidly sweeping them away, and the traveler
regrets or not their disappearance, according as his views may be
sentimental or sanitarian. They are truly ill adapted to modern ideas of
hygiene, or to those cunning modern devices which sometimes poison their
very inventors. While we may smile at our ancestors' free and easy way
of pitching things out of the window, we should at least remember that
they knew nothing of the modern plague of sewer-gas stealing its
insidious way into the apparently best-regulated households. But without
entering upon the vexed question of hygiene, the fact is that where
there is no reason for propping up a tottering roof except that it once
sheltered some bloody, cattle-stealing chieftain of the Border,
utilitarian sentiments carry