Bass Rock it assumes the aspect of a bank of thin sea
fog.

Immediately underneath upon the south, you command
the yards of the High School, and the towers and courts
of the new Jail - a large place, castellated to the
extent of folly, standing by itself on the edge of a
steep cliff, and often joyfully hailed by tourists as the
Castle. In the one, you may perhaps see female prisoners
taking exercise like a string of nuns; in the other,
schoolboys running at play and their shadows keeping step
with them. From the bottom of the valley, a gigantic
chimney rises almost to the level of the eye, a taller
and a shapelier edifice than Nelson's Monument. Look a
little farther, and there is Holyrood Palace, with its
Gothic frontal and ruined abbey, and the red sentry
pacing smartly too and fro before the door like a
mechanical figure in a panorama. By way of an outpost,
you can single out the little peak-roofed lodge, over
which Rizzio's murderers made their escape and where
Queen Mary herself, according to gossip, bathed in white
wine to entertain her loveliness. Behind and overhead,
lie the Queen's Park, from Muschat's Cairn to
Dumbiedykes, St. Margaret's Loch, and the long wall of
Salisbury Crags: and thence, by knoll and rocky bulwark
and precipitous slope, the eye rises to the top of
Arthur's Seat, a hill for magnitude, a mountain in virtue
of its bold design. This upon your left. Upon the
right, the roofs and spires of the Old Town climb one
above another to where the citadel prints its broad bulk