It was a stormy morning when the mercurial Professor of
Botany, recking naught of the rain that saturated his brown cloak, itself
reluctantly donned, led me hither and thither, through the highways and
byways of old Edinburgh. Everywhere a litter of building operations, and
we trod gingerly many a decadent staircase. Sometimes a double row of
houses had already been knocked away, revealing a Close within a Close,
eyeless house behind blind alley, and even so the diameter of the court
still but a few yards. What human ant-heaps, what histories, farces,
tragedies played out in airless tenebrosity!
The native writers seem to have strangely neglected the artistic wealth
of all this poverty: pathos and humour reside, then, only in villages!
Thrums and Drum-tochty and Galloway exhaust the human tragi-comedy. Ah!
my friends, go to the ant-hill and be wise! The Professor of Botany
(seeming now rather of entomology) explained the principle upon which he
was destroying and rebuilding. One had to be cautious. He pointed out the
head of a boy carved over one of the archways, the one survivor of a
fatal subsidence many years ago, when the ground floor of one of the
gigantic houses was converted into a shop, with plate-glass windows in
lieu of the solid stonework.
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