The arrival of the London newspapers at the Tontine Reading Rooms was in the old days the signal for riotous excitement. Immediately on receiving the bag of papers from the Post Office, the waiter locked himself up in the bar. After he had sorted the different papers and had made them up in a heap, he unlocked the door and, making a sudden rush into the middle of the room, tossed up the whole heap as high as the ceiling. Then came an irresistible rush and scramble of subscribers, every one darting forward to lay hold of a paper. Sometimes a lucky and agile fellow would secure five or six and run off into a corner, to select his favourite: always hotly pursued by half a dozen of the disappointed scramblers, who without ceremony snatched away the first they could lay hold of, regardless of its being torn in the contest. On those occasions a heap of gentlemen could often be seen sprawling on the floor and climbing over one another’s backs, like so many schoolboys. The name of the hotel derived from the financial, lottery-like principle of the tontine, by which the building funds were raised. One hundred and seven shares of £50 each were subscribed in 1781; the interest upon the investment being paid at regular intervals, and the property gradually devolving, as the members of the tontine died, upon the survivors; the lessening number of the persons to share out increasing _pro rata_ the value of the survivors’ holding. The “Tontine Hotel” ceased to be an hotel many years ago, and is now the warehouse of Messrs. Moore, Taggart & Co. XXXVI Here, then, we are come to the end of this long journey, into the roaring, overcrowded streets of modern Glasgow. I shall not attempt to describe the Glaswegian: there are so many varieties of him. Nor his accent, which evades characterisation. The Londoner, accustomed to think his own city busy and crowded, will find, on coming to Glasgow, that he has still something to learn about congested streets. Let him, for example, resort to the Central station of the Caledonian Railway (the whistles of whose Prussian-blue-painted engines have an accent of their own) and he shall see a high tide of life new to him. [Illustration: TRONGATE.]