These houses were not homes, each occupied by but one family. They were rather like the modern apartment houses, consisting of a succession of floors or flats, each forming a separate suite of living-rooms, so that every structure harbored many households. Of such floors there were seldom fewer than six, and sometimes ten or twelve, the edifices towering to an immense height; and, because built upon an eminence, rendered still more imposing. It was toward the middle of the eighteenth century before the well-to-do citizens left these narrow quarters for more extensive and level areas beyond the ravine. There is now no suggestion of aristocracy here, for these are now real tenement houses. The hygienic situation, however, even though the tenants are humble folk, reveals a vast improvement upon the days when elegant lords and ladies inhabited these lofty rookeries, which remind one of the Cliff Dwellings of Arizona--or those modern “cliff dwellings,” the homes of the luxurious literary club men on the lake-front of Chicago. In old days it was a common practice to throw the slops and garbage out of the upper windows into the street below. The ordinary word of warning, supposed to be good Scotch and still in use, is “Gardeloo,” which is only a corruption of the French “Gardez de l’eau” (Look out for the water). It is but one of a thousand linguistic or historic links with Scotland’s old friend and ally, France. In fact, until near the nineteenth century, Edinburgh’s reputation for dirt, though it was shared with many other European cities in which our ancestors dwelt, was proverbial, especially when refuse of all sorts was flung from every story of the lofty houses. From the middle of the street to the houses on both sides lay a vast collection of garbage ripening for transportation to the farms when spring opened. In this the pigs wallowed when driven in, at the close of the day, from the beech or oak woods by the hog-reeve. The prominent features of the prehistoric kitchen middens, which modern professors so love to dig into, were, in this High Street, in full bloom and the likeness was close. How different, in our time, when municipal hygiene has become, in some places at least, a fine art! There is a reason why “the plague” no longer visits the British Isles. Nor, as of old, is “Providence” so often charged with visiting “mysterious” punishment upon humanity. Science has helped man to see himself a fool and to learn that cleanliness is next to godliness. The modern Scot, for the most part, believes that laziness and dirt are the worst forms of original sin. Yet it took a long course in the discipline of cause and effect to make “Sandy” fond of soap, water, and fumigation. In this, however, he differed, in no whit, from our other ancestors in the same age.