There was nothing fanciful, at least, but every circumstance of terror and reality, in the fall of the land in the High Street.  The building had grown rotten to the core; the entry underneath had suddenly closed up so that the scavenger’s barrow could not pass; cracks and reverberations sounded through the house at night; the inhabitants of the huge old human bee-hive discussed their peril when they encountered on the stair; some had even left their dwellings in a panic of fear, and returned to them again in a fit of economy or self-respect; when, in the black hours of a Sunday morning, the whole structure ran together with a hideous uproar and tumbled story upon story to the ground.  The physical shock was felt far and near; and the moral shock travelled with the morning milkmaid into all the suburbs.  The church-bells never sounded more dismally over Edinburgh than that grey forenoon.  Death had made a brave harvest, and, like Samson, by pulling down one roof, destroyed many a home.  None who saw it can have forgotten the aspect of the gable; here it was plastered, there papered, according to the rooms; here the kettle still stood on the hob, high overhead; and there a cheap picture of the Queen was pasted over the chimney.  So, by this disaster, you had a glimpse into the life of thirty families, all suddenly cut off from the revolving years.  The land had fallen; and with the land how much!  Far in the country, people saw a gap in the city ranks, and the sun looked through between the chimneys in an unwonted place.  And all over the world, in London, in Canada, in New Zealand, fancy what a multitude of people could exclaim with truth:  ’The house that I was born in fell last night!’

CHAPTER III.  THE PARLIAMENT CLOSE.

Time has wrought its changes most notably around the precincts of St. Giles’s Church.  The church itself, if it were not for the spire, would be unrecognisable; the KRAMES are all gone, not a shop is left to shelter in its buttresses; and zealous magistrates and a misguided architect have shorn the design of manhood, and left it poor, naked, and pitifully pretentious.  As St. Giles’s must have had in former days a rich and quaint appearance now forgotten, so the neighbourhood was bustling, sunless, and romantic.  It was here that the town was most overbuilt; but the overbuilding has been all rooted out, and not only a free fair-way left along the High Street with an open space on either side of the church, but a great porthole, knocked in the main line of the Lands, gives an outlook to the north and the New Town.