and the people stood to gossip at their doors, as they
might have done in Colinton or Cramond.

In a great measure we may, and shall, eradicate this
haunting flavour of the country. The last elm is dead in
Elm Row; and the villas and the workmen's quarters spread
apace on all the borders of the city. We can cut down
the trees; we can bury the grass under dead paving-
stones; we can drive brisk streets through all our sleepy
quarters; and we may forget the stories and the
playgrounds of our boyhood. But we have some possessions
that not even the infuriate zeal of builders can utterly
abolish and destroy. Nothing can abolish the hills,
unless it be a cataclysm of nature which shall subvert
Edinburgh Castle itself and lay all her florid structures
in the dust. And as long as we have the hills and the
Firth, we have a famous heritage to leave our children.
Our windows, at no expense to us, are most artfully
stained to represent a landscape. And when the Spring
comes round, and the hawthorns begin to flower, and the
meadows to smell of young grass, even in the thickest of
our streets, the country hilltops find out a young man's
eyes, and set his heart beating for travel and pure air.


CHAPTER VII.
THE VILLA QUARTERS.


MR. RUSKIN'S denunciation of the New Town of