employment and a home in Edinburgh. The cottage in which I lodged was inhabited by an old farm-servant--a tall, large-bodied, small-headed man, who, in his journey through life, seemed to have picked up scarce an idea; and his wife, a woman turned of sixty, though a fine enough _body_ in the main, and a careful manager, was not more intellectual. They had but a single apartment in their humble dwelling, fenced off by a little bit of partition from the outer door--and I could fain have wished that they had two--but there was no choice of lodgings in the village, and I had just to content myself, as the working man always must in such circumstances, with the shelter I could get. My bed was situated in the one end of the room, and my landlady's and her husband's in the other, with the passage by which we entered between; but decent old Peggy Russel had been accustomed to such arrangements all her life long, and seemed never once to think of the matter; and--as she had reached that period of life at which women of the humbler class assume the characteristics of the other sex, somewhat, I suppose, on the principle on which very ancient female birds put on male plumage--I in a short time ceased to think of it also. It is not the less true, however, that the purposes of decency demand that much should be done, especially in the southern and midland districts of Scotland, for the dwellings of the poor. FOOTNOTES: [6] Uncle James would scarce have sanctioned, had he been consulted in the matter, the use to which the carcase of his dead eagle was applied. There lived in the place an eccentric, half-witted old woman, who, for the small sum of one halfpenny, used to fall a-dancing on the street to amuse children, and rejoiced in the euphonious though somewhat obscure appellation of "Dribble Drone." Some young fellows, on seeing the eagle divested of its skin, and looking remarkably clean and well-conditioned, suggested that it should be sent to "Dribble;" and, accordingly, in the character of a "great goose, the gift of a gentleman," it was landed at her door. The gift was thankfully accepted. Dribble's cottage proved odoriferous at dinner-time for the several following days; and when asked, after a week had gone by, how she had relished the great goose which the gentleman had seat, she replied, that it was "Unco sweet, but oh! teuch, teuch!" For years after, the reply continued to be proverbial in the place: and many a piece of over-hard stock-fish, and over-fresh steak, used to be characterized as, "Like Dribble Drone's eagle, unco sweet, but oh! teuch, teuch!" [7] Well known as Gilfillan's song is among ourselves, it is much less so to the south of the Border, and I present it to my English readers, as a worthy representative, in these latter days, of those ludicrous songs of our country in the olden time which are so admirably suited to show, notwithstanding the gibe of Goldsmith, "That a Scot may have humour, I almost said wit."