AN ELGIN FUNERAL BILL.
Mr. Paufer’s means must have been indeed limited, for unless prices had greatly risen in the previous thirty years, a good dinner and wine could have been provided at a most moderate charge, to judge by the following entries in an Elgin “funeral bill,” dated Sept 26, 1742:—
| “One dozen strong old claret (bottles being returned) | 14s. | 0d. |
| 4 lb. 12 oz. of sugar | 3s. | 4d. |
| five dozen eggs | 5d. | |
| six hens | 2s. | 0d.”[549] |
One pound of sugar, it will be noticed, cost as much as two hens, and a little more than eight dozen eggs. With sugar at such a price it must have given a shock to a careful Scotch housewife to see well-sweetened lemonade flung out of the window merely because a waiter had used his dirty fingers to drop in the lumps.
ELGIN.
To Johnson Elgin seemed “a place of little trade and thinly inhabited.” Yet Defoe, writing only fifty years earlier, had said: “As the country is rich and pleasant, so here are a great many rich inhabitants, and in the town of Elgin in particular, for the gentlemen, as if this was the Edinburgh or the Court for this part of the island, leave their Highland habitations in the winter, and come and live here for the diversion of the place and plenty of provisions.”[550]
THE PIAZZAS IN ELGIN.
Much of its ancient prosperity has returned to it. If it cannot boast of being a court for the north, it is at all events a pleasant little market-town that shows no sign of decay. The covered ways which in many places ran on each side of the street have disappeared. “Probably,” writes Boswell, “it had piazzas all along the town, as I have seen at Bologna. I approved much of such structures in a town, on account of their conveniency in wet weather. Dr. Johnson disapproved of them, ‘because,’ said he, ‘it makes the under story of a house very dark, which greatly overbalances the conveniency, when it is considered how small a part of the year it rains; how few are usually in the street at such times; that many who are might as well be at home; and the little that people suffer, supposing them to be as much wet as they commonly are in walking a street.’” “They were a grand place for the boys to play at marbles,” said an old man to me, who well remembered the past glories of Elgin and the delights of his youth. Even at the time of our travellers’ visit, they were frequently broken by houses built in the modern fashion. In many cases they have not been destroyed, but converted into small shops. “There are,” writes a local antiquary, “some fine old piazzas in the High Street which have been whitewashed over and hidden.” He suggests that some of these might be restored to the light of day.[551] It would be a worthy deed for the citizens, even in one spot, to bring back the former appearance of their ancient town.