Mr Borrow was the younger son of an officer in a marching regiment; and in the course of the peregrinations of the corps, found himself located in Edinburgh Castle. His father, though somewhat appalled at the notion of his children acquiring the fatal taint of a Scottish dialect, determined, very wisely, to send both his boys to the High School; which circumstance calls forth the following magnificent apostrophe:-- "Let me call thee up before my mind's eye, High School, to which every morning the two English brothers took their way from the proud old Castle, through the lofty streets of the Old Town. High School!--called so, I scarcely know why; neither lofty in thyself nor by position, being situated in a flat bottom; oblong structure of tawny-stone, with many windows fenced with iron-netting--with thy long hall below, and thy five chambers above, for the reception of the five classes, into which the eight hundred urchins, who styled thee instructress, were divided. Thy learned rector and his four subordinate dominies; thy strange old porter of the tall form and grizzled hair, hight Boee, and doubtless of Norse ancestry, as his name declares; perhaps of the blood of Bui hin Digri, the hero of northern song--the Jomsborg Viking, who clove Thorsteinn Midlangr asunder in the dread sea-battle of Horunga Vog, and who, when the fight was lost, and his own two hands smitten off, seized two chests of gold with his bloody stumps, and, springing with them into the sea, cried to the scanty relics of his crew, 'Overboard, now, all Bui's lads!' Yes, I remember all about thee, and how at eight of every morn we were all gathered together with one accord in the long hall, from which, after the litanies had been read, (for so I will call them, being an Episcopalian,) the five classes from the five sets of benches trotted off in long files, one boy after the other, up the five spiral staircases of stone, each class to its destination; and well do I remember how we of the third sat hushed and still, watched by the eye of the dux, until the door opened, and in walked that model of a good Scotchman, the shrewd, intelligent, but warm-hearted and kind dominie, the respectable Carson."