One of Carlyle’s best passages is the account in _Sartor Resartus_ of his perambulation of the Rue St. Thomas de L’Enfer, the spiritual conflict that he waged then with himself, the victory that he won in which the everlasting “Yes” answered the everlasting “No.” Under the somewhat melodramatic French name Leith Walk is signified, the most commonplace thoroughfare in a town where the ways are rarely commonplace. Perhaps the name was suggested by a quaint incident that befell him there. He was walking along it when a drunken sailor coming from Leith and “tacking” freely as he walked ran into a countryman going the other way. “Go to hell,” said the sailor, wildly and unreasonably enraged. “Od, man, I’m going to Leith,” said the other, “as if merely pleading a previous engagement, and proceeded calmly on his way.” I have said the fates were kind in linking together though but for a moment the lives of Burns and Scott, and they were unkind in refusing this to the lives of Scott and Carlyle. You wish that in some way or other they had allowed Carlyle and Robert Louis Stevenson to meet, if but for a moment, so that the last great writer whom Edinburgh has produced might have had the kindly touch of personal intercourse with his predecessors; but it was not to be, nor are there many R.L.S. Edinburgh anecdotes worth the telling. This which he narrates of his grandfather, Robert of Bell Rock fame, is better than any about himself. The elder Stevenson’s wife was a pious lady with a circle of pious if humble friends. One of those, “an unwieldy old woman,” had fallen down one of those steep outside stairs abundant in old Edinburgh, but she crashed on a passing baker and escaped unhurt by what seemed to Mrs. Stevenson a special interposition of Providence. “I would like to know what kind of Providence the baker thought it,” exclaimed her husband.