Along the line of the present Princes Street had formerly been the “Lang Gait,” or “Lang Dykes,” a rough road through rough country, where Claverhouse had clattered angrily towards the Highlands at the head of his troopers. This had been the scene of many a footpad robbery and murder, and many lovers’ evening strolls; but, when the New Town was built, it gradually was feued out, from east to west; and along it were built a single line of houses looking right across the valley and up towards the Old Town. It was proposed to call this--the principal street of New Edinburgh--“St. Giles Street,” after the patron saint of Edinburgh, which would have been a very appropriate name, and a slight offer of amends to the Saint for the insult offered to his effigy when the rude-minded rabble ducked it in the Nor’ Loch in the first days of the Reformation. However, George III. objected. “Hey, hey--what, what? St. Giles Street! never do! never do!” No doubt to Londoners the name might awaken associations with a neighbourhood unknown beyond London; but George III. showed some ignorance of Scottish history, for the district of St. Giles in London owes its name to the founder of a leper hospital--Maud, daughter of Malcolm Canmore and Queen Margaret, who, when Queen of England, evidently sometimes felt a little homesick and very patriotic, and bestowed on her charity the name of the patron saint of Edinburgh. And what became of the Nor’ Loch? The citizens had no longer to swim across it two at a time on a collier’s horse, as had the Hamiltons after the “Cleanse the Causeway” battle. The Nor’ Loch, formed in 1450 when first Edinburgh was walled, had done its duty and had its day, and was drained; and its place--now well-kept gardens--was for long a boggy morass. Across this morass some Lawnmarket shopkeepers were accustomed to make their way to investigate the progress of the new city; and, as the ground was marshy and muddy, they laid a few planks across to form a foot-bridge. George Boyd, a dealer in tartan, called “Five o’clock,” in jocular allusion to his bandy legs, seems to have been particularly impressed by the plank bridge; and, when some loose earth from a quarry fell on it and made the bridge more secure, his mind, which worked better than his legs, caught at the suggestion that the earth flung out by the builders from the foundations of the New Town might form a bridge across the valley. The suggestion was adopted, and the earth, to the amount, it has been calculated, of about two million cartloads, was deposited and a great mound formed in the valley of the Nor’ Loch, just below the centre of the High Street; and “Geordie Boyd’s brig” became “the Earthen Mound,” and so continued to be called until well on in the nineteenth century. So, indeed, one well-known and venerable Edinburgh citizen still speaks of it.