I reached Edinburgh in the early afternoon, and, following the signs that pointed the way to the poor man’s section, brought up in Haymarket Square. A multitude of unemployed, in groups and in pairs, sauntering back and forth, lounging about the foot of the central statue, filled the place. Here a hooligan, ragged and unkempt as his hearers, was holding forth, to as many as cared to listen, on the subject of governmental iniquities. There another, less fortunate than his unfortunate fellows, wandered from group to group in his shirt-sleeves, vainly trying to sell his coat for a “tanner” to pay a night’s lodging.
High above towered the vast bulk of Edinburgh castle. A royal infant lowered from its windows, as happened, ’tis said, in the merry days of Queen Bess, would land to-day in a most squalid lodging house. Indeed, this is one point that the indigent wanderer gains over the wealthy tourist. The cheap quarters, the slums of to-day are, in many a European city, the places where the history of yesterday was made. The great man of a century ago did not dwell in a shaded suburb; he made his home where now the hooligan and the laborer eke out a precarious existence.
The sorry-looking building at the foot of the castle rock bore the sign:—
“Edinburgh Castle Inn. Clean, Capacious Beds, 6d.”
I had too often been misled by similar self-assertive adjurations to expect any serious striving on the part of the proprietor to keep anything but the sign in any marked degree of cleanliness. I was not prepared, however, to find the place as filthy as it proved. The cutting satire of the ensign was doubly apparent when I escaped again into the square. A “Bobby” marched pompously up and down not far from the brazen-voiced speaker, whose power of endurance should have won him a livelihood somewhere.
“Where shall I find a fairly cheap lodging house?” I inquired.
“Try the Cawstle Inn h’over there,” replied “Bobby,” with a majestic wave of his Sunday gloves towards the hostelry I had just inspected.
“But that place is not clean!” I protested.
“Not clean! Certainly it’s clean! There’s a bloomin’ law makes ’em keep ’em clean,” and “Bobby” glared at me as if I had libeled the King’s Parliament and the Edinburgh police-force into the bargain.
I entered another inn facing the square, but was thankful to escape from it to the one I had first visited. Paying my “tanner” at a misshapen wicket, I received a stub bearing the number of my sty and passed into the main room. It was furnished with benches, tables, and a cooking establishment. For four pence the guest might have set before him an unappetizing, though fairly abundant, supper. By far the greater number of the inmates, however, were crowded around several cooking stoves at the back of the room. Water, fuel, and utensils were provided gratis to all who had paid their lodging. On the stoves was sputtering or boiling every variety of cheap food, tended by tattered men who handled frying-pans with their coat-tails as holders, and cut up cabbages or peeled potatoes with knives on the blades of which were half-inch deposits of tobacco. Each ate his concoction with the greatest relish as soon as it showed the least sign of approaching an edible condition, generally without any allowance of time for boiling messes to cool, thereby suffering more than once dire injury.