Jone being just as lively on his legs as he ever was in his life, thanks to the waters of Buxton, and I having the rheumatism now only in my arm, which I don’t need to walk with, we have gone pretty much all over Edinburgh, and a great place it is to walk in, so far as variety goes.  Some of the streets are so steep you have to go up steps if you are walking, and about a mile around if you are driving.  I never get tired wandering about the Old Town with its narrow streets and awfully tall houses, with family washes hanging out from every story.

The closes are queer places.  They are very like little villages set into the town as if they was raisins in a pudding.  You get to them by alleys or tunnels, and when you are inside you find a little neighborhood that hasn’t anything more to do with the next close, a block away, than one country village has with another.

We went to see John Knox’s house, and although Mr. Knox was pretty hard on vanities and frivolities, he didn’t mind having a good house over his head, with woodwork on the walls and ceilings that wasn’t any more necessary than the back buttons on his coat.

We have been reading hard since we have been in Edinburgh, and whenever Mr. Knox and Mary Queen of Scots come together, I take Mary’s side without asking questions.  I have no doubt Mr. Knox was a good man, but if meddling in other people’s business gave a person the right to have a monument, the top of his would be the first thing travellers would see when they come near Edinburgh.

When we went to Holyrood Palace it struck me that Mary Queen of Scots deserved a better house.  Of course, it wasn’t built for her, but I don’t care very much for the other people who lived in it.  The rooms are good enough for an ordinary household’s use, although the little room that she had her supper party in when Rizzio was killed, wouldn’t be considered by Jone and me as anything like big enough for our family to eat in.  But there is a general air about the place as if it belonged to a royal family that was not very well off, and had to abstain from a good deal of grandeur.

If Mary Queen of Scots could come to life again, I expect the Scotch people would give her the best palace that money could buy, for they have grown to think the world of her, and her pictures blossom out all over Edinburgh like daisies in a pasture field.

The first morning after we got here I was as much surprised as if I had met Mary Queen of Scots walking along Prince Street with a parasol over her head.  We were sitting in the reading-room of the hotel, and on the other side of the room was a long desk at which people was sitting, writing letters, all with their backs to us.  One of these was a young man wearing a nice light-colored sack coat, with a shiny white collar sticking above it, and his black derby hat was on the desk beside him.  When he had finished his letter he put a stamp on it and got up to mail