soon spin
itself out and fill the vaults from end to end with its mysterious
labours. In truth, it is only some gear of the steam ventilator; and you
will find the engineers at hand, and may step out of their door into the
sunlight. For all this while, you have not been descending towards the
earth's centre, but only to the bottom of the hill and the foundations
of the Parliament House; low down, to be sure, but still under the open
heaven and in a field of grass. The daylight shines garishly on the back
windows of the Irish quarter; on broken shutters, wry gables, old
palsied houses on the brink of ruin, a crumbling human pig-sty fit for
human pigs. There are few signs of life, besides a scanty washing or a
face at a window: the dwellers are abroad, but they will return at night
and stagger to their pallets.

CHAPTER IV

LEGENDS

The character of a place is often most perfectly expressed in its
associations. An event strikes root and grows into a legend, when it has
happened amongst congenial surroundings. Ugly actions, above all in ugly
places, have the true romantic quality, and become an undying property
of their scene. To a man like Scott, the different appearances of nature
seemed each to contain its own legend ready made, which it was his to
call forth: in such or such a place, only such or such events ought with
propriety to happen; and in this spirit he made the "Lady of the Lake"
for Ben Venue, the "Heart of Midlothian" for Edinburgh, and the
"Pirate," so indifferently written but so romantically conceived, for
the desolate islands and roaring tideways of the North. The common run
of mankind have, from generation to generation, an instinct almost as
delicate as that of Scott; but where he created new things, they only
forget what is unsuitable among the old; and by survival of the fittest,
a body of tradition becomes a work of art. So, in the low dens and
high-flying garrets of Edinburgh, people may go back upon dark passages
in the town's adventures, and chill their marrow with winter's tales
about the fire: tales that are singularly apposite and characteristic,
not only of the old life, but of the very constitution of built nature
in that part, and singularly well qualified to add horror to horror,
when the wind pipes around the tall _lands_, and hoots adown arched
passages, and the far-spread wilderness of city lamps keeps quavering
and flaring in the gusts.

Here, it is the tale of Begbie the