with impotent rage, and her tongue wild with curses. Attended by small boys, who bait her with taunts and nicknames, and who appreciate the comic element which so strangely underlies the horrible sight, she is conveyed to the police cell, and will be brought before the magistrate to-morrow--for the twentieth time perhaps--as a "drunk and disorderly," and dealt with accordingly. This is the kind of life the Canongate presents to-day--a contrast with the time when the tall buildings enclosed the high birth and beauty of a kingdom, and when the street beneath rang to the horse-hoofs of a king. [Sidenote: The Cowgate] The New Town is divided from the Old by a gorge or valley, now occupied by a railway station; and the means of communication are the Mound, Waverley Bridge, and the North Bridge. With the exception of the Canongate, the more filthy and tumble-down portions of the city are well kept out of sight. You stand on the South Bridge, and looking down, instead of a stream, you see the Cowgate, the dirtiest, narrowest, most densely peopled of Edinburgh streets. Admired once by a French ambassador at the court of one of the Jameses, and yet with certain traces of departed splendour, the Cowgate has fallen into the sere and yellow leaf of furniture brokers, second-hand jewellers, and vendors of deleterious alcohol. These second-hand jewellers' shops, the trinkets seen by bleared gaslight, are the most melancholy sights I know. Watches hang there that once ticked comfortably in the fobs of prosperous men, rings that were once placed by happy bridegrooms on the fingers of happy brides, jewels in which lives the sacredness of death-beds. What tragedies, what disruptions of households, what fell pressure of poverty brought them here! Looking in through the foul windows, the trinkets remind one of shipwrecked gold embedded in the ooze of ocean--gold that speaks of unknown, yet certain, storm and disaster, of the yielding of planks, of the cry of drowning men. Who has the heart to buy them, I wonder? The Cowgate is the Irish portion of the city. Edinburgh leaps over it with bridges; its inhabitants are morally and geographically the lower orders. They keep to their own quarters, and seldom come up to the light of day. Many an Edinburgh man has never set his foot in the street; the condition of the inhabitants is as little known to respectable Edinburgh as are the habits of moles, earth-worms, and the mining population. The people of the Cowgate seldom visit the upper streets. You may walk about the New Town for a twelvemonth before one of these Cowgate pariahs comes between the wind and your gentility. Should you wish to see that strange people "at home," you must visit them. The Cowgate will not come to you: you must go to the Cowgate. The Cowgate holds high drunken carnival every Saturday night; and to walk along it then, from the West Port, through the noble open space of the Grassmarket--where the