At any rate it was none such bad news to send by the carrier, who put up at the Black Bull in the Grassmarket, down to my mother and grandmother in Eden Valley. I wrote to them separately, but to my father first, because he understood such things and I knew that his heart was set on Freddie and myself, though he thought (and rightly) that I was a mere clodhopper at my books compared to Fred. As far as the classics went, my father was in the right of it. But then Freddie could not write English, except in a kind of long-winded, elaborate way, as if he were translating from Cicero, which very likely was the case. Well, the need of keeping my head for the examiners' questions, the mending of my pens, the big barren room with the books about and the other fellows scribbling away for dear life, the landladies in this close and that square, with faces hardened and tempers sharpened by generations of needy students, out of whom they must nevertheless make their scanty livings, the penetrating Edinburgh airs, the thinness of my cloak and the clumsiness of my countrified rig--these all kept me singularly aware of myself, and prevented any yielding to the folly of homesickness, or, as in my case, "Irma-sickness," to give the trouble its proper name. After long search I took up my lodging in a new house at the end of Rankeillor Street, in a place where there was the greenness of fields every way about, except behind in the direction of the college. It was the very last house, and from my garret window I could see the top of Arthur's Seat and the little breakneck path feeling its way round the foot of the Salisbury Crags, afterwards to be widened into the "Radicals' Road." Southward all was green and whaup-haunted to the grey hip of Pentland, and we saw the spread of the countryside when we--that is, Freddie and I--went down the Dalkeith Road to the red-roofed hamlet of Echobank. Here, four times a week we bought a canful of milk that had to do us two days. For there was something about the taste of the town milk that scunnered us--Freddie especially being more delicately stomached than I. Here, too, was a red-cheeked serving maid who provoked us--but more especially poor Fred, who asked nothing better than that the wench should let him alone. But I cared not so greatly--though, of course, she was nothing to me. How could she be with the gage of Miss Irma hard under my armpit, just where the Eden Valley tailor had placed my inside pocket?