through among which we dashed, as if they had been as much
gingerbread--while men on horseback were seen flinging themselves off,
and drivers dismounting in all directions, making their escape up
flights of steps and common stairs--mothers or nurses with broods of
young children flying hither and thither in distraction, or standing
on the very crown of the causeway, wringing their hands in despair.
The wheel-barrows were easily disposed of--nor was there much greater
difficulty with the gigs and shandrydans. But the hackney-coaches
stood confoundedly in the way--and a wagon, drawn by four horses, and
heaped up to the very sky with beer-barrels, like the Tower of Babel
or Babylon, did indeed give us pause--but ere we had leisure to
ruminate on the shortness of human life, we broke through between the
leaders and the wheels with a crash of leathern breeching, dismounted
collars, riven harness, and tumbling of enormous horses that was
perilous to hear; when, as Sin and Satan would have it--would you
believe it?--there, twenty kilts deep at the least, was the same
accursed Highland regiment, the forty-second, with fixed bayonets, and
all its pipers in the van, the pibroch yelling, squeaking, squealing,
grunting, growling, roaring, as if it had only that very instant
broken out--so, suddenly to the right--about went the bag-pipe-haunted
mare, and away up the Mound, past the pictures of Irish Giants--Female
Dwarfs--Albinos--an Elephant endorsed with towers--Tigers and Lions of
all sorts--and a large wooden building, like a pyramid, in which there
was the thundering of cannon--for the battle, we rather think, of
Camperdown was going on--the Bank of Scotland seemed to sink into
the NorLoch--one gleam through the window of the eyes of the
Director-General--and to be sure how we did make the street-stalls of
the Lawn-market spin! The man in St. Giles's steeple was playing his
one o'clock tune on the bells, heedless in that elevation of our
career--in less than no time John Knox, preaching from a house