"Heave awa'!" cried a piping voice amid the
_debris_: "I'm no dead yet."
The Professor's own destruction was conservative in character: it was his
aim to preserve the ancient note in the architecture, and to make a clean
Old Edinburgh of a dirty. Air and light were to be no longer excluded;
outside every house, as flats or storeys are called, a balcony was to
run, giving on sky and open ground. Eminent personages like Lord
Rosebery, ancestrally connected with ancient demesnes, long perverted
into pigsties, had been induced to repurchase them, thus restoring an
archaic flavour of aristocratic prestige to these despised quarters. The
moral effect of grappling with an evil that had seemed so hopeless could
not fail to be inspiring; and, as we plodded through the pouring:
streets, "I will remove this, I will reconstruct that," cried the
enthusiastic Professor, till I almost felt I was walking with the Emperor
of Edinburgh. But whence come the sinews of war? Evidently no professor's
privy purse would suffice. I gathered that the apostle of the sanitary
picturesque had inspired sundry local capitalists with his own patriotic
enthusiasm. What a miracle, this trust in a man over-brimming with ideas,
the brilliant biological theoriser of "The Evolution of Sex" in the
Contemporary Science Series, the patron of fantastic artists like John
Duncan! Obviously it is his architectural faculty that has saved him.
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