The next day was a great day in Edinburgh--an almost universal holiday, full of flags, processions, and all manner of political rejoicings--the Reform Jubilee. Cosmo plunged into the midst of it with all the zeal of a young politician and all the zest of a school-boy, and was whirled about by the crowd through all its moods and phases, through the heat, and the dust, and the sunshine, through the shouts and groans, the applauses and the denunciations, to his heart’s content. He came in breathless somewhere about midday, as he supposed, though in reality it was late in the afternoon, to snatch a hurried morsel of the dinner which Mrs. Purdie had vainly endeavored to keep warm for him, and to leave a message for Cameron to be ready for him in the evening, to go out and see the illumination. When Cosmo reappeared again, flushed, tired, excited, yet perfectly ready to begin once more, it was already darkening towards night. Cameron was ready, and the boy was not to be persuaded to lose the night and “the fun,” which already began to look rather like mischief. The two companions, so unlike each other, made haste to the Calton Hill, where a great many people had already preceded them. Oh, dwellers on the plains! oh, cockney citizens!--spite of your gas stars and your transparencies--your royal initials and festoons of lamps, don’t suppose that you know any thing about an illumination; you should have seen the lines of light stealing from slope to slope along the rugged glory of that antique Edinburgh--the irregular gleams descending into the valley, the golden threads, here and there broken, that intersected the regular lines of the new town. Yonder tall houses, seven stories high, where every man is a Reformer, and where the lights come out in every window, star by star, in a flicker and glow, as if the very weakness of those humble candles gave them the animation and humanness of a breathing triumph--swelling higher towards the dark Castle, over whose unlighted head the little moon looks down, a serene spectator of all this human flutter and commotion--undulating down in rugged breaks towards lowly Holyrood, sometimes only a thin line visible beneath the roof--sometimes a whole house aglow. The people went and came, in excited groups, upon the fragrant grass of the Calton Hill; sometimes turning to the other side of the landscape, to see the more sparely lighted streets of gentility, or the independent little sparkle which stout little Leith in the distance threw out upon the Firth--but always returning with unfailing fascination to this scene of magic--the old town shining with its lamps and jewels, like a city in a dream.