From that far coast.
Welcome beneath this roof of mine!
Welcome! this vacant chair is thine,
Dear guest and ghost!"[8]
GLINTS IN AULD REEKIE.
As soon as one comes to know Edinburgh, he feels a gratitude to that old gentleman of Fife who is said to have invented the affectionate phrase "Auld Reekie." Perhaps there never was any such old gentleman; and perhaps he never did, as the legend narrates, regulate the hours of his family prayers, on summer evenings, by the thickening smoke which he could see rising from Edinburgh chimneys, when the cooking of suppers began.
"It's time now, bairns, to tak the beuks an' gang to our beds; for yonder's Auld Reekie, I see, putting on her nichtcap," are the words which the harmless little tradition puts into his mouth. They are wisely dated back to the reign of Charles II., a time from which none now speak to contradict; and they serve as well as any others to introduce and emphasize the epithet which, once heard, is not forgotten by a lover of Edinburgh, remaining always in his memory, like a pet name of one familiarly known.
It is not much the fashion of travellers to become attached to Edinburgh. Rome for antiquity, London for study and stir, Florence for art, Venice for art and enchantment combined,—all these have pilgrims who become worshippers, and return again and again to them, as the devout return to shrines. But few return thus to Edinburgh. It continually happens that people planning routes of travel are heard to say, "I have seen Edinburgh," pronouncing the word "seen" with a stress indicating a finality of completion. Nobody ever uses a phrase in that way about Rome or Venice. It is always, "We have been in," "spent a winter in," "a summer in," or "a month in" Rome, or Venice, or any of the rest; and the very tone and turn of the phrase tell the desire or purpose of another winter, or summer, or month in the remembered and longed-for place.
But Edinburgh has no splendors with which to woo and attract. She is "a penniless lass;" "wi' a lang pedigree," however,—as long and as splendid as the best, reaching back to King Arthur at least, and some say a thousand years farther, and assert that the rock on which her castle stands was a stronghold when Rome was a village. At any rate, there was a fortress there long before Edinburgh was a town, and that takes it back midway between the five hundredth and six hundredth year of our Lord. From that century down to this it was the centre of as glorious and terrible fighting and suffering as the world has ever seen. Kingly besieged and besiegers, prisoners, martyrs, men and women alike heroic, their presences throng each doorway still; and the very stones at a touch seem set ringing again with the echoes of their triumphs and their agonies.