EDINBURGH TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW Life holds not an hour that is better to live in: the past is a tale that is told, The future a sun-flecked shadow, alive and asleep, with a blessing in store. SWINBURNE. In Edinburgh, at whatever other hour of the day the resident or tourist may let his mind dwell in the past, at one o’clock he will always be brought back to the present moment; for at one o’clock the gun goes off at the Castle, and horses and men and women that are gun-shy are greatly startled, and every one pulls out his watch. But, except precisely at one o’clock, it is as impossible to exist in Edinburgh without living in the past as it would be to walk along Princes Street without seeing the Castle. We are a little archaic in Edinburgh. Yet there are other things of the present that you may notice after you have set your watch to Greenwich time by the one-o’clock gun. Princes Street is gay with shop windows under awnings, with the big bow-windows of the Clubs, with many hotels; and now there are bigger and newer hotels to east and to west, at the railway stations. And Princes Street is full of a constant stream of traffic, plying in the wide street between the one broad pavement on the north side and the row of statues along the green sward and the blazing flower-beds in the beautiful gardens opposite: cable cars with noisy bells, motor cars, carriages, bicycles, electric broughams, station lorries, hansom cabs, and the crawling “char-a-bancs,” with their scarlet-coated drivers, picking up passengers for the Forth Bridge or Roslin. But still the north-east wind takes the liberty of blowing from the Forth among all these modern innovations, and whirling an unwary hat or a too-lightly-held newspaper high into the air. As the wind is unchanged in temper, so are the natural features unchanged in beauty; and the views of the city, “from a’ the airts the wind can blaw,” are pictures to gladden the artist or the poet. There is the “Marmion view” from the south,--the view that Scott loved and Turner painted,--but with a denser massing of suburb than they saw, reaching right up to the furzy knoll where Marmion stood. Here is the Castle in all its majesty, with the Grassmarket and Cowgate huddled picturesquely under its precipices, and the old dark descending spine of the High Street, with St. Giles’s open crown over the roofs, and then all the maze and glitter of a newer world, with its many domes and steeples, and the Forth beyond.