The population of a large town is perpetually receiving accessions from the country—not for the purpose of increasing the aggregate of inhabitants, but to supply the waste of existence which takes place in such a scene, and to furnish a better selection for the peculiar offices and business of a city than what could be obtained from the successive generations of the ordinary inhabitants. Nothing can be more clear than that the youths born and bred in a large city have a less chance to establish themselves in its first-rate lines of business, than the lads who come in from the country as adventurers; the fact being, that the latter are a selection of stirring clever spirits from a large mass, while only the same proportion of the former are likely to possess the proper merit or aptitude. Besides, the town-bred lad is apt to have some points of silly pride about his status in society; he cannot do this and he cannot do that, for fear of the sneers of the numerous contemporaries under whose eyes he is always walking. But the gilly, hot from Banff or Inverness, who comes into the town, “with bright and flowing hair,” rugging and riving for a place in some writer’s office, or elsewhere—why, the fellow would push into the most sacred parts of a man’s house, like Roderick Random, and at the most unconscionable hours, in search of some prospective situation; and when he has got it, what cares he about what he does (within honesty) in order to advance himself, seeing that all whoever knew him before are on the other side of the Grampians. Thus, the sons of the respectable people of large cities are constantly retiring from the field—some to the East Indies, some to the West—some evanish nobody knows how—while their places are taken by settlers from all parts of the country, whose children, in their turn, give way to fresh importations. Then, there is a constant tide towards the capital, of all kinds of rural people, who, having failed to improve their fortunes in the country, are obliged to try what may be done in the town. A broken-down country merchant sets up a grocery shop in some suburb—a farmer who has been obliged to relinquish his _dulcia arva_, sets up an hostelry for carriers, and so forth. Every recurrence of Whitsunday and Martinmas sends in large droves of people on the tops of heavy carts, to pitch their camps in Edinburgh; many of them with but very uncertain prospects of making a livelihood when they get there, but yet the most of them astonished a year or two after to find that they are still living, with the children all at the school as formerly, although, to be sure, the “reeky toun” can never be like the green meadows and dear blue hills which they have left behind in Menteith, or Ayrshire, or Tweeddale. What change, to be sure, to these good people, is the close alley of the Old Town of Edinburgh, the changeless prospect of house tops and chimneys, and the black wall opposite to their windows,