Glimpses of Three Coasts

by Helen Hunt Jackson

Groping and rummaging in Hyndford's Close, one day, for recognizable traces of Lady Maxwell's house, we had the good fortune to encounter a thrifty housewife, of the better class, living there. She was coming home, with her market-basket on her arm. Seeing our eager scenting of the old carvings on lintels and sills, and overhearing our mention of the name of the Duchess of Gordon, she made bold to address us.

"It waur a strange place for the nobeelity to be livin' in, to be sure," she said. "I'm livin' mysil in ane o' the best of 'im, an' it's na mair space to 't than ud turn a cat. Ye're welcome to walk up, if ye like to see what their dwellin's waur like in the auld time. It's a self-contained stair ye see," she added with pride, as she marshalled us up a twisting stone stairway, so narrow that even one person, going alone, must go cautiously to avoid grazing elbows and shins on the stone walls, at every turn. "I couldna abide the place but for the self-contained stair: there's not many has them," she continued. "Mind yer heads! mind yer heads! There's a stoop!" she cried; but it was too late. We had reached, unwarned, a point in the winding stair where it was necessary to go bent half double; only a little child could have stood upright. With heads dizzy from the blow and eyes half blinded by the sudden darkness, we stumbled on, and brought out in a passage-way, perhaps three feet wide and ten long, from which opened four rooms: one the kitchen, a totally dark closet, not over six feet square; a tiny grate, a chair, table, and a bunk in the wall, where the servant slept, were all its furniture. The woman lighted a candle to show us how convenient was this bunk for the maid "to lie." Standing in the middle of the narrow passage, one could reach his head into kitchen, parlor, and both bedrooms without changing his position. The four rooms together would hardly have made one good-sized chamber. Nothing but its exquisite neatness and order saved the place from being insupportable! Even those would not save it when herring suppers should be broiling in the closet surnamed kitchen. Up a still smaller, narrower crevice in the wall led a second "self-contained stair," dark as midnight, and so low roofed there was no standing upright in it, even at the beginning. This led to what the landlady called the "lodgers' flairt." We had not courage to venture up, though she was exceedingly anxious to show us her seven good bedrooms, three double and four single, which were nightly filled with lodgers, at a shilling a night.

Only the "verra rayspectable," she said, came to lodge with her. Her husband was "verra pairticular." Trades-people from the country were the chief of their customers, "an' the same a-comin' for seven year, noo." No doubt she has as lively a pride, and gets as many satisfactions between these narrow walls, as did the lords and ladies of 1700. Evidently not the least of her satisfactions was the fact that those lords and ladies had lived there before her.

Nowhere are Auld Reekie's antitheses of new and old more emphasized than in the Cowgate. In 1530 it was an elegant suburb. The city walls even then extended to enclose it, and it was eloquently described, in an old divine's writings, as the place "ubi nihil est humile aut rusticum, sed omnia magnifica."

In one of its grassy lanes the Earl of Galloway built a mansion. His countess often went to pay visits to her neighbors, in great state, driving six horses; and it not infrequently happened that when her ladyship stepped into her coach, the leaders were standing opposite the door at which she intended to alight.

Here dwelt, in 1617, the famous "Tam o' the Cowgate," Earl of Haddington, boon companion of King James, who came often to dine with him, and gave him the familiar nickname of Tam. Tam was so rich he was vulgarly believed to have the philosopher's stone; but he himself once gave a more probable explanation of his wealth, saying that his only secret lay in two rules,—"never to put off till to-morrow that which could be done to-day," and "never to trust to another what his own hand could execute."

To-day there is not in all the world, outside the Jewish Ghetto of Rome, so loathly wretched a street as this same Cowgate. Even at high noon it is not always safe to walk through it; and there are many of its wynds into which no man would go without protection of the police. Simply to drive through it is harrowing. The place is indescribable. It seems a perpetual and insatiable carnival of vice and misery. The misery alone would be terrible enough to see; but the leering, juggling, insolent vice added makes it indeed hellish. Every curbstone, door-sill, alley mouth, window, swarms with faces out of which has gone every trace of self-respect or decency; babies' faces as bad as the worst, and the most aged faces worst of all. To pause on the sidewalk is to be surrounded, in a moment, by a dangerous crowd of half-naked boys and girls, whining, begging, elbowing, cursing, and fighting. Giving of an alms is like pouring oil on a fire. The whole gang is ablaze with envy and attack: the fierce and unscrupulous pillage of the seventeenth century is re-enacted in miniature in the Cowgate every day, when an injudicious stranger, passing through, throws a handful of pennies to the beggars. The general look of hopeless degradation in the spot is heightened by the great number of old-clothes shops along the whole line of the street. In the days when the Cowgate was an elegant suburb, the citizens were permitted by law to extend their upper stories seven feet into the street, provided they would build them of wood cut in the Borough Forest, a forest that harbored robbers dangerous to the town. These projecting upper stories are invaluable now to the old-clothes venders, who hang from them their hideous wares, in double and treble lines, fluttering over the heads and in the faces of passers-by; the wood of the Borough Forest thus, by a strange irony of fate, still continuing to harbor dangers to public welfare. If these close-packed tiers of dangling rags in the Cowgate were run out in a straight single line, they would be miles long; a sad beggars' arras to behold. The preponderance of tattered finery in it adds to its melancholy: shreds of damask; dirty lace; theatrical costumes; artificial flowers so crumpled, broken, and soiled that they would seem to have been trodden in gutters,—there was an indefinable horror in the thought that there could be even in the Cowgate a woman creature who could think herself adorned by such mockeries of blossoms. But I saw more than one poor soul look at them with longing eyes, finger them, haggle at the price, and walk away disappointed that she could not buy.

The quaint mottoes here and there in the grimy walls, built in when the Cowgate people were not only comfortable but pious, must serve often now to point bitter jests among the ungodly. On one wretched, reeking tenement is: "Oh, magnify the Lord with me, and let us exalt his name together. 1643." On another, "All my trist is in ye Lord."

A token I saw in the Cowgate of one life there not without hope and the capacity of enjoyment. It was in a small window, nine stories up from the ground, in a wynd so close that hands might be clasped from house to house across it. It was a tiny thing, but my eye fell on it with as much relief as on a rift of blue sky in a storm: it was a little green fern growing in a pot. Outside the window it stood, on a perilously narrow ledge. As I watched it I grew frightened, lest the wind should blow it down, or a vicious neighbor stone it off. It seemed the brave signal flying of a forlorn hope, of a dauntless, besieged soul that would never surrender; and I shall recollect it long after every other picture of the Cowgate scenes has grown dim.

The more respectable of the pawnbrokers' or second-hand-goods shops in Edinburgh are interesting places to rummage. If there were no other record of the slow decay and dwindling fortunes of the noble Scottish folk, it could be read in the great number of small dealers in relics of the olden time.