"Mr. Johnson and I walked arm-in-arm up the High street," says Boswell, "to my house in James's Court: it was a dusky night: I could not prevent his being assailed by the evening effluvia of Edinburgh. As we marched slowly along he grumbled in my ear, 'I smell you in the dark.'" Mrs. Boswell had never seen Johnson before, and was by no means charmed with him, as Johnson was not slow to discover. In a matrimonial aside she whispered to her husband, "I have seen many a bear led by a man, but I never before saw a man led by a bear." No doubt her provocations were great, and she wins the compassionate sympathy of all good housekeepers when they read of Ursa Major brightening up the candles by turning the melted wax out on the carpet. Many years after this, but while Boswell was still living in James's Court, a lad named Francis Jeffrey one night helped to carry the great biographer home--a circumstance in the life of a gentleman much more of an every-day or every-night affair at that time than at present. The next day Boswell patted the lad on the head, and kindly added, "If you go on as you have begun, you may live to be a Bozzy yourself yet." The stranger who enters what is apparently the ground-floor of one of these houses on the north side of High street is often surprised to find himself, without having gone up stairs, looking from a fourth-story window in the rear. This is due to the steep slope on which the houses stand, and gives them the command of a beautiful view, including the New Town, and extending across the Firth of Forth to the varied shores of Fife. From his flat in James's Court we find David Hume, after his return from France, writing to Adam Smith, then busy at Kirkcaldy about the _Wealth of Nations_, "I am glad to have come within sight of you, and to have a view of Kirkcaldy from my windows." Another feature of these houses is the little cells designed for oratories or praying-closets, to which the master of the house was supposed to retire for his devotions, in literal accordance with the gospel injunction. David Hume's flat had two of these, for the spiritual was relatively better cared for than the temporal in those days: plenty of praying-closets, but _no drains_! This difficulty was got over by making it lawful for householders, after ten o'clock at night, to throw superfluous material out of the window--a cheerful outlook for Boswell and others being "carried home"! [Illustration: BUCCLEUGH PLACE, WHERE THE "EDINBURGH REVIEW" WAS PROJECTED.] [Illustration: COLLEGE WYND, WHERE SCOTT WAS BORN.] At the bottom of Byre's Close a house is pointed out where Oliver Cromwell stayed, and had the advantage of contemplating from its lofty roof the fleet which awaited his orders in the Forth. The same house was once occupied by Bothwell, bishop of Orkney, and is associated with the memory of Anne, the bishop's daughter, whose sorrows are enbalmed in plaintive beauty in the old cradle-song: