It was our almost daily practice to walk through the Old Town, and we were now familiar with every street and close in that densely-crowded quarter. Our quest for the sites of ancient landmarks never grew monotonous, and we were always reconstructing, in imagination, the Cowgate, the Canongate, the Lawnmarket, and the High Street, until we could see Auld Reekie as it was in bygone centuries. In those days of continual war with England, people crowded their dwellings as near the Castle as possible, so floor was piled upon floor, and flat upon flat, families ensconcing themselves above other families, the tendency being ever skyward. Those who dwelt on top had no desire to spend their strength in carrying down the corkscrew stairs matter which would descend by the force of gravity if pitched from the window or door; so the wayfarer, especially after dusk, would be greeted with cries of 'Get oot o' the gait!' or 'Gardy loo!' which was in the French 'Gardez l'eau,' and which would have been understood in any language, I fancy, after a little experience. The streets then were filled with the debris flung from a hundred upper windows, while certain ground-floor tenants, such as butchers and candlemakers, contributed their full share to the fragrant heaps. As for these too seldom used narrow turnpike stairs, imagine the dames of fashion tilting their vast hoops and silken show-petticoats up and down in them! That swine roamed at will in these Elysian fields is to be presumed, since we have this amusing picture of three High Street belles and beauties in the Traditions of Edinburgh:-- 'So easy were the manners of the great, fabled to be so stiff and decorous,' says the author, 'that Lady Maxwell's daughter Jane, who afterward became the Duchess of Gordon, was seen riding a sow up the High Street, while her sister Eglantine (afterwards Lady Wallace of Craigie) thumped lustily behind with a stick.' No wonder, in view of all this, that King James VI., when about to bring home his 'darrest spous,' Anne of Denmark, wrote to the Provost, 'For God's sake see a' things are richt at our hame-coming; a king with a new-married wife doesna come hame ilka day.'