upon the loch from Arthur’s Seat; but it is tenfold more so on a day of skating.  The surface is thick with people moving easily and swiftly and leaning over at a thousand graceful inclinations; the crowd opens and closes, and keeps moving through itself like water; and the ice rings to half a mile away, with the flying steel.  As night draws on, the single figures melt into the dusk, until only an obscure stir, and coming and going of black clusters, is visible upon the loch.  A little longer, and the first torch is kindled and begins to flit rapidly across the ice in a ring of yellow reflection, and this is followed by another and another, until the whole field is full of skimming lights.

CHAPTER X. TO THE PENTLAND HILLS.

On three sides of Edinburgh, the country slopes downward from the city, here to the sea, there to the fat farms of Haddington, there to the mineral fields of Linlithgow.  On the south alone, it keeps rising until it not only out-tops the Castle but looks down on Arthur’s Seat.  The character of the neighbourhood is pretty strongly marked by a scarcity of hedges; by many stone walls of varying height; by a fair amount of timber, some of it well grown, but apt to be of a bushy, northern profile and poor in foliage; by here and there a little river, Esk or Leith or Almond, busily journeying in the bottom of its glen; and from almost every point, by a peep of the sea or the hills.  There is no lack of variety, and yet most of the elements are common to all parts; and the southern district is alone distinguished by considerable summits and a wide view.

From Boroughmuirhead, where the Scottish army encamped before Flodden, the road descends a long hill, at the bottom of which and just as it is preparing to mount upon the other side, it passes a toll-bar and issues at once into the open country.  Even as I write these words, they are being antiquated in the progress of events, and the chisels are tinkling on a new row of houses.  The builders have at length adventured beyond the toll which held them in respect so long, and proceed to career in these fresh pastures like a herd of colts turned loose.  As Lord Beaconsfield proposed to hang an architect by way of stimulation, a man, looking on these doomed meads, imagines a similar example to deter the builders; for it seems as if it must come to an open fight at last to preserve a corner of green country unbedevilled.  And here, appropriately enough, there stood in old days a crow-haunted gibbet, with two bodies hanged in chains.  I used to be shown, when a child, a flat stone in the roadway to which the gibbet had been fixed.  People of a willing fancy were persuaded, and sought to persuade others, that this stone was never dry.  And no wonder, they would add, for the two men had only stolen fourpence between them.