[Picture: “Squalor and Picturesqueness”] The modern traveller by road, coming in by the London Road, Greenside, Leith Street, and Princes Street, comes in by the New Town, and sees on his left, across a deep ravine, partly occupied by a huge railway station and partly by beautiful public gardens, the dark mass of the Castle and the Old Town crowning the opposite heights, grey and stern, in effective contrast with the gay flower-beds down below, the old houses huddling together on the scanty foothold of the ridge and rising to sheer heights. _That_ is the original historic town: _this_, to which the modern traveller comes by road, the new. Little more than a hundred years ago this New Town was not thought of: its site the meadows and wastes that sloped down to the Firth of Forth and the sea, and the site of the railway station and the Princes Street Gardens covered with the dark waters of the Nor’ Loch. Old-time arrivals in Edinburgh, coming in by Canongate, found themselves in midst of squalor and picturesqueness; and although much of the picturesque is gone, it is still a quaint street and the squalor survives. The poor who live here “hang forth their banners from the outward walls,” in the shape of their domestic washing, fluttering in the breeze from every window, at the end of long poles, and how poor they are may be judged from the condition of the clothes they consider worth keeping. That sometime prison, the Canongate Tolbooth, facing the long street, remains one of the most curious relics of Edinburgh’s past. Not a very ancient past, for it was only “biggit” in 1591, but old enough to be regarded with reverence, and quaint to admiration, with its spired tower and tourelles, so eminently Scotch of that period when the French influence in architecture was yet strong. You can match those curious spires time and time again among the old châteaux of the Loire, and in Brittany; just as in the old Norman town of Coutances one can find the counterpart of the old theatre in Playhouse Close, near by. [Picture: Canongate]