ever casting its dark shade into their little apartments, for the pleasant open fields in which they have sown and reaped for half a lifetime, and where every little rustic locality is endeared to them by a thousand delightful recollections! But yet it is amazing how habit and necessity will reconcile the mind to the most alien novelties. And, even here, there are some blessings. The place of worship (always an important matter to decent country people in Scotland) is perhaps nearer than it used to be. Mr Simpson’s chapel in the Potterrow is amazingly convenient. Education for the children, though dearer, is better and more varied. There is also a better chance of employment for the youngsters when they grow up. Then Sandy Fletcher, the —— carrier, goes past the door every Wednesday, with a cart-load of home reminiscences, and occasionally a letter or a parcel from some friend left at the place which they have deserted. By means of this excellent specimen of corduroyed honesty and worth, they still get all their butter and cheese from the sweet pastures of their own country side, so that every meal almost brings forward some agreeable association of what, from feeling as well as habit, they cannot help still calling _home_. Then it is always made a point with them to plant themselves in an outskirt of the town, corresponding to the part of the country from which they come, and where they think they will have at least a specimen of the fresh air. A Clydesdale family, for instance, hardly ever thinks of taking a house (at least for the first year or two) any where but in the Grassmarket, or about Lauriston, or the Canal Basin. People from East Lothian harbour about the Canongate. Bristo Street and the Causewayside are appropriated indefeasibly to settlers from Selkirkshire and Peeblesshire. Poll the people thereabouts, and you will find a third of them natives of those two counties. In fact, the New Town, or any thing beyond the Cowgate, is a kind of _terra borealis incognita_ to folk from the south of Scotland. They positively don’t know any thing about those places, except, perhaps, by report. Well, it must certainly be agreeable, if one is banished from the country into a town, at least to dwell in one of the outlets towards _that part of the country_; so that the exile may now and then cast his thoughts and his feelings straight along the highway towards the place endeared to him; and if he does not see the hills which overlook the home of his heart, at least, perhaps, hills from which he knows he can see other hills, from which the spot is visible—the long stages of fancy in straining back to the place “——He ne’er forgets, though there he is forgot.”