It was in Princes Street that we had alighted,--named thus for the
prince who afterwards became George IV.--and I hope he was, and is,
properly grateful. It ought never to be called a street, this most
magnificent of terraces, and the world has cause to bless that
interdict of the Court of Session in 1774 which prevented the
Gradgrinds of the day from erecting buildings along its south side,-
-a sordid scheme that would have been the very superfluity of
naughtiness.

It was an envious Glasgow body who said grudgingly, as he came out
of Waverley Station, and gazed along its splendid length for the
first time, "Weel, wi' a' their haverin', it's but half a street
onyway!"--which always reminded me of the Western farmer who came
from his native plains to the beautiful Berkshire hills. "I've
always heard o' this scenery," he said. "Blamed if I can find any
scenery; but if there was, nobody could see it, there's so much high
ground in the way!"

To think that not so much more than a hundred years ago Princes
Street was nought but a straight country road, the `Lang Dykes' and
the `Lang Gait,' as it was called.

We looked down over the grassy chasm that separates the New from the
Old Town; looked our first on Arthur's Seat, that crouching lion of
a mountain; saw the Corstorphine Hill, and Calton heights, and
Salisbury Crags, and finally that stupendous bluff of rock that
culminates so majestically in Edinburgh Castle. There is something
else which, like Susanna Crum's name, is absolutely and ideally
right! Stevenson calls it one of the most satisfactory crags in