Page:Penelope's Progress.djvu/119

Rh fancy, after a little experience. The streets then were filled with the débris flung from a hundred upper windows, while certain ground-floor tenants, such as butchers and candlemakers, contributed their full share to the fragrant heaps. As for these too seldom used narrow turnpike stairs, imagine the dames of fashion tilting their vast hoops and silken show-petticoats up and down in them! That swine roamed at will in these Elysian fields is to be presumed, since we have this amusing picture of three High Street belles and beauties in the "Traditions of Edinburgh:"—

"So easy were the manners of the great, fabled to be so stiff and decorous," says the author, "that Lady Maxwell's daughter Jane, who afterward became the Duchess of Gordon, was seen riding a sow up the High Street, while her sister Eglantine (afterwards Lady Wallace of Craigie) thumped lustily behind with a stick."

No wonder, in view of all this, that King James VI., when about to bring home his "darrest spous" Anne of Denmark, wrote to the Provost, "For God's sake see a' things are richt at our hame-coming; a king with a new-married wife doesna come hame ilka day."

Had it not been for these royal home-comings and visits of distinguished foreigners, now and again aided by something still more salutary, an occasional outbreak of the plague, the easy-going