The air is rhythmic with the up-and-down slur of this speech of “aye” and “na.” Curious faces flash past. Threadbare lawyers argue pompously as they saunter back arm in arm toward Parliament Close, and the ruddy-cheeked girls, by contrast, seem so distracting that a foreigner rages at the sentiment that “kissing is out of season when the gorse is out of bloom.” Occasionally, even at so early an hour, there is evidence of the passion for drink. “Willie brew’d a peck o’ maut” flashes to mind, and one fancies the unsteady ones are trying to hum, “We are na fou, we’re no that fou, but just a drappie in our ee.” When night comes on, sober men in the streets have reason to frown censoriously; and if it be a Saturday night, they may even feel lonesome.
A passing regiment is a welcome interruption and a brave spectacle. It is always hailed with shouts of joy. All Edinburgh turns in its bed Sunday mornings at nine to see the Black Watch come out from the Castle for “church parade” at St. Giles’s. Nothing stirs Princes Street on any week day like a military display. It is a thrilling moment to a stranger, perhaps, when he has his first glimpse of a young Tommy Atkins, and he stops stock-still to take in the bright scarlet, tailless jacket, the tight trousers, the “pill-box” perilously cocked over an ear, and the inevitable “swagger cane” with which he slaps his leg as he braves it along. But what is that to the passing of a company of Highlanders! Along they come, kilts and plaids, sporrans swinging, claymores rattling, and jolly Glengarry bonnets poised rakishly to the falling point. Ten pipers are droning and three drummers are pounding; and one watches, as they pass, for the holly sprig, or what-not, they wear in their bonnets as a badge of the clan. The best show is made by the King’s Highlanders from up Balmoral way; and splendid they are in royal Stuart tartan, with the oak leaf and thistle in their bonnets and each man carrying a Lochaber axe. If there is anything more inspiriting than cheery bagpipe music at such a time, no one to laugh foolishly at it and every one to love it, and the men stepping proudly and the crowd applauding,—I, for one, do not know it.
Keenness of impressions, as we all know, may depend on the most trivial circumstances of time and place. I recall, for example, a sharp and thrilling musical experience in Scotland, with the instrument nothing more than the despised and humble mouth-organ. Perhaps it was the mood, perhaps the setting, perhaps the unexpectedness of it; there was so little and yet so much. At all events, I shall not soon forget the sparkle and stir of “The British Grenadiers” as it ripped the sharp night air of quiet Melrose to the approach of three English soldiers, one with the mouth-organ and the others whistling in time as they marched briskly along. I shall always remember the rhythmic beat of their feet as they swung across the murky, deserted square, the loudness, the thrill, and the lilt of that historic melody, and the flicker of a lamp in a window here and there and the pleasant sting of the keen night air.
There is no better place for a stranger to “get his bearings” in Edinburgh than out on that valley-spanning boulevard they call “The Mound.” He then has the Old Town to one side and the New Town to the other, and on opposite corners, as if to maintain the balance, the Castle and Calton Hill. He also takes note of the several bridges that clamp the town together, as it were; and he may look down into the gardens before him and watch the children playing as far as the promenade-covered Waverley Station, or he may turn and look the other way and see quite as many more all the way along the pleasant green to the old battle-scarred West Kirk of St. Cuthbert’s where De Quincey lies in his quiet grave. Thus he will find himself of a sunny afternoon between the pleasant horns of a most agreeable dilemma. He must choose whether to spend his first hour in the New Town or the Old. If he remembers what Ruskin said he will fly from the New; but then he may go there, after all, if he recalls the opinion of the old skipper cited by Stevenson, whose most radiant conception of Paradise was “the New Town of Edinburgh, with the wind the matter of a point free.” He must decide whether his present inclination is for latter-day city features, like conventional streets lined with substantial gray stone buildings looking all very much alike, for the fashionables of Charlotte Square and Moray Place and the bankers and brokers of St. Andrew Square, or the historic ground of crowded old High Street and the Castle and Holyrood. He would find in the New Town some old places, too, for it is one hundred and fifty years old, and there are the literary associations of the last century and the house on Castle Street where Scott lived more than a quarter-century—“poor No. 39,” as he called it in his Journal—and wrote the early Waverley Novels, and rejoiced along with his mystified friends in the tremendous success of “The Great Unknown.” He would find it a rapidly modernizing city; no longer may the children salute the lamplighter on his nightly rounds with “Leerie, Leerie, licht the lamps!” But he would find the most interesting things there the oldest things, and they all in the Antiquarian Museum—and what a show! John Knox’s pulpit, the banners of the Covenanters, the “thumbikins” that “aided” confession and the guillotine “Maiden” that rewarded it, the pistols Robert Burns used as an exciseman, and the sea-chest and cocoanut cup of Alexander Selkirk, the real Robinson Crusoe; and there, too, is Bonnie Prince Charlie’s blue ribbon of the Garter and the ring Flora Macdonald gave him when they parted. If historic paraphernalia is alluring, however, the scenes of its associations are much more so; and our friend would doubtless hesitate no longer, but turn to the Old Town and trudge up the steep way to the Castle.
“You tak’ the high road
And I’ll tak’ the low road,
And I’ll get to Scotland afore ye”;—
and if the song had kept to geography it would probably have added, “And we’ll meet at the bonny Castle o’ Auld Reekie.” Such, at least, has been a Scotch custom for thirteen hundred years; and with every reason. Through the long and cruel centuries it has gathered to its flinty gray bosom memories of every possible phase of national mutation, desperate or glorious, gloomy or gay. One approaches it with awe. So long has it gripped the summit of that impregnable rock, half a thousand feet sheer on three of its sides, that it has blended into the life and color of its foundations, like a huge chameleon, until one could scarcely say where rock leaves off and castle begins. A stern and pitiless object, tolerating only here and there a grassy crevice at its base, and a clinging tree or two. In the great “historic mile” of High Street, lifting gradually from Holyrood to this rugged elevation, one feels the illusion of an enormous scornful finger extended dramatically westward toward the traditional rival, Glasgow. There is no need to see Highland regiments drilling on its broad esplanade, or to enter its sally-port or penetrate the dungeons in its rocky depths to have confidence that the royal regalia of “The Honours of Scotland” are safe enough here, on the red cushions in their iron cage. One enters, and there settles upon him a feeling of sharing in every grim tradition since the doughty days “when gude King Robert rang.” It is not a visit; it is an initiation.
Quite worthy of this savage stronghold is the inspiring outlook from its parapets over hills and rivers and storied glens. One turns impatiently from “Mons Meg,” which may have been a big gun in some past day of little ones, to gaze afar over the carse of Stirling and the trailing silver links of the Forth to where the snow shines in the clefts of Ben Ledi, or out over the Pentland Hills where the “Sweet Singers” awaited the Judgment. The sportsman will think of the grouse-shooting at Loch Earn; the sentimentalist will reflect that when night settles over Aberdeenshire the pipers will strike up their strathspeys and there will be Scotch reels by torchlight. Scotland seems unrolled at your feet and Scottish songs rush to mind until you fairly bound the region in verse and story: To the north and northwest, “Bonnie Dundee,” the glens of “Clan Alpine’s warriors true,” Bannockburn and “Scots wha hae wi’ Wallace bled,” and “The Banks of Allan Water”; to the north and east, the Firth of Forth where the fishwives’ “puir fellows darkle as they face the billows”; to the west and southwest, “The banks and braes o’ bonnie Doon,” “Tam o’Shanter’s” land, “Sweet Afton” and “Bonnie Loch Leven” whence “the Campbells are comin’”; and to the south, “The braes of Yarrow,” “Norham’s castled steep, Tweed’s fair river, broad and deep, and Cheviot’s mountains lone,” and, most sung of all, “The Border”:—
“England shall, many a day, tell of the bloody fray