From this magnificence of nature and art, the transition was painful to what I saw of the poorer population.  On Saturday evening I found myself at the market, which is then held in High-street and the Netherbow, just as you enter the Canongate, and where the old wooden effigy of John Knox, with staring black eyes, freshly painted every year, stands in its pulpit, and still seems preaching to the crowd.  Hither a throng of sickly-looking, dirty people, bringing with them their unhealthy children, had crawled from the narrow wynds or alleys on each side of the street.  We entered several of these wynds, and passed down one of them, between houses of vast height, story piled upon story, till we came to the deep hollow of the Cowgate.  Children were swarming in the way, all of them, bred in that close and impure atmosphere, of a sickly appearance, and the aspect of premature age in some of them, which were carried in arms, was absolutely frightful.  “Here is misery,” said a Scotch gentleman, who was my conductor.  I asked him how large a proportion of the people of Edinbugh belonged to that wretched and squalid class which I saw before me.  “More than half,” was his reply.  I will not vouch for the accuracy of his statistics.  Of course his estimate was but a conjecture.

In the midst of this population is a House of Refuge for the Destitute, established by charitable individuals for the relief of those who may be found in a state of absolute destitution of the necessaries of life.  Here they are employed in menial services, lodged and fed until they can be sent to their friends, or employment found for them.  We went over the building, a spacious structure, in the Canongate, of the plainest Puritan architecture, with wide low rooms, which, at the time of the union of Scotland with England, served as the mansion of the Duke of Queensbury.  The accommodations of course are of the humblest kind.  We were shown into the sewing-room, were we saw several healthy-looking young women at work, some of them barefooted.  Such of the inmates as can afford it, pay for their board from three and sixpence to five shillings a week, besides their labor.

In this part of the city also are the Night Asylums for the Houseless.  Here, those who find themselves without a shelter for the night, are received into an antechamber, provided with benches, where they first get a bowl of soup, and are then introduced into a bathing-room, where they are stripped and scoured.  They are next furnished with clean garments and accommodated with a lodging on an inclined plane of planks, a little raised from the floor, and divided into proper compartments by strips of board.  Their own clothes are, in the mean time, washed, and returned to them when they leave the place.

It was a very different spectacle from the crowd in the Saturday evening market, that met my eyes the next morning in the clean and beautiful streets of the new town; the throng of well-dressed church-goers passing each other in all directions.  The women, it appeared to me, were rather gaily dressed, and a large number of them prettier than I had seen in some of the more southern cities.