On the east coast, Edinburgh was not merely expanding; it was on the way to transforming itself. Unable by its location to share directly in the overseas trade, it throve on the legal business which grew out of that trade, on the increasing demand for education which benefited both the university and the printers and booksellers, and on the invested profits of Scotsmen who had made money in the East or West Indies and who settled in the capital when they retired. Until after the ’45 the city was still packed along the ridge from Holyrood to the Castle, its population crowded into the tall tenements which shut out the low northern sun from the narrow wynds. Its first expansion was to the south, in a development, near the present site of the University, on which Burns’s father and uncle found work when they struck out for themselves in 1750. To the north of the Old Town all was then open country. At the foot of the Castle Rock, where the railway tracks now run, the marshy Nor Loch still received whatever of the city’s garbage did not remain in the streets. Burns was four years old when the real growth of the modern city began with the building of the North Bridge to connect the Old Town with the ridge which paralleled it to northward. Each year thereafter saw new houses or new squares added, but as late as 1800 the New Town still consisted only of Princes, George, and Queen Streets from St. Andrew Square to Charlotte Square. Until after Burns’s death the whole area, despite the Georgian dignity and charm of its houses, retained many of the features of a new and raw development. In particular, the valley was half choked by the hideous Mound formed of the earth excavated in grading the New Town. The laying out of the Princes Street Gardens and the crowning of the Mound with the Scottish National Gallery were still far in the future--there was even talk of a row of buildings on the south side of Princes Street which would have blinded one of the finest city vistas in the world, and have made the Gardens forever impossible. By 1786, when Burns first saw Edinburgh, wealth and fashion had already deserted the Old Town, and middle-class respectability was beginning to follow, but the business life of the city still centred in the shops and taverns which lined the High Street, crammed the narrow Luckenbooths which congested traffic beside disfigured St. Giles’s, and overflowed into all the adjacent courts and closes. Professional men transacted their business in taverns in preference to their crowded living-quarters; all Edinburgh was accustomed to gather at midday in the neighbourhood of the Cross to arrange business and social appointments.