Sanitation did not exist. Water for cooking and such exiguous washing as was done was carried by porters from the public wells to the various flats in the tall ‘lands’; the day’s filth of the household was collected in a tub on the landing of the stairs and at bedtime the barefoot maid-servants emptied it out of the windows--theoretically to be gathered up by the scavengers; actually, too often, to lie where it fell until a rain washed it away. Even the hardy nostrils of Londoners quailed before the marshalled stenches of Edinburgh, and travelling Scotsmen gauged the smells of foreign cities like Lisbon by their nasal memories of home. That children should die like flies was inevitable; the marvel is that any survived. Deficiency diseases were as rife as filth diseases. Rickets was taken for granted--a simile, humorous in intent but ghastly in effect in one of Scott’s letters, gives a glimpse of nurse-maids in Princes Street trying to compel unhappy rachitic children to walk. Human life has always been Scotland’s cheapest commodity. That a high degree of social and intellectual culture should flourish amid this filth is merely another proof of human capacity for ignoring what it is too indolent to correct. Outside the cities, as well as in them, Scottish life was beginning to change. Primitive agriculture in the northern kingdom, like the sanitation of Edinburgh, seemed almost to be an effort to demonstrate just how badly a thing could be done. The poorest sorts of oats and barley, the scrubbiest of cattle, were raised by the worst methods. The unfenced fields were divided by a system of ridges and ditches which managed to combine the maximum of soil wastage with the minimum of drainage. The ‘infield’, as this dyked portion of the farm was called, was cultivated with ploughs so crude and awkward that they required four horses and two men to handle them. The ‘outfield’, or pasture, was never cultivated or manured; overrun with moss and weeds it yielded even in summer only a scanty and unwholesome pasturage, with little if any surplus to carry the cattle through the winter. All excess stock was slaughtered in the fall, and for six months of the year the people who could afford meat at all had to subsist like seamen on salt beef and smoked mutton hams. The wretched beasts which were kept through the winter were fed mainly on straw, and frequently by spring were so weak and emaciated that they had to be carried to the pasture.