Page:A Companion and Useful Guide to the Beauties of Scotland.djvu/136

118 expected from an education begun and ended in the street. I was one fine evening walking up this inviting Canongate, nicely dressed, in white muslin: an arch boy eyed me, and laid his scheme;—for when I arrived opposite a pool, in the golden gutter, in he dashed a large stone, and, like a monkey, ran off chuckling at his mischief.

Though the whole of the town of Edinburgh is far more cleanly, in one article, than it used to be, yet the Canongate still bears strong marks of its old customs; for haud your haund, haud your haund, is still very necessary to cry out; and even that will not do in the Canongate now, if perchance one should be there after ten o'clock in the evening: for at that hour one begins to hear, stop—here, there, and every where. Even in the middle of the street, where decent folks generally walk for fear of accidents, they are not exempt from splashes, unless they are in high good luck.

At times one's nose recalls to the mind Sawney's soliloquy on coming within the distance of twenty miles of the capital of Scotland, when he exclaimed, "ah! canny Edinburgh, I smeel thee nooe!" At the bottom of the Canongate is the