not offer by themselves the materials of a rich
existence. It was not choice, so much as an external
fate, that kept Fergusson in this round of sordid
pleasures. A Scot of poetic temperament, and without
religious exaltation, drops as if by nature into the
public-house. The picture may not be pleasing; but what
else is a man to do in this dog's weather?

To none but those who have themselves suffered the
thing in the body, can the gloom and depression of our
Edinburgh winter be brought home. For some constitutions
there is something almost physically disgusting in the
bleak ugliness of easterly weather; the wind wearies, the
sickly sky depresses them; and they turn back from their
walk to avoid the aspect of the unrefulgent sun going
down among perturbed and pallid mists. The days are so
short that a man does much of his business, and certainly
all his pleasure, by the haggard glare of gas lamps. The
roads are as heavy as a fallow. People go by, so
drenched and draggle-tailed that I have often wondered
how they found the heart to undress. And meantime the
wind whistles through the town as if it were an open
meadow; and if you lie awake all night, you hear it
shrieking and raving overhead with a noise of shipwrecks
and of falling houses. In a word, life is so unsightly
that there are times when the heart turns sick in a man's
inside; and the look of a tavern, or the thought of the
warm, fire-lit study, is like the touch of land to one
who has been long struggling with the seas.