The castle and all its rocks, in peristrephic panorama, then floated cloud-like by--and we saw the whole mile-length of Prince's-street stretched before us, studded with innumerable coaches, chaises, chariots, carts, wagons, drays, gigs, shandrydans, and wheel-barrows, through among which we dashed, as if they had been as much gingerbread--while men on horseback were seen flinging themselves off, and drivers dismounting in all directions, making their escape up flights of steps and common stairs--mothers or nurses with broods of young children flying hither and thither in distraction, or standing on the very crown of the causeway, wringing their hands in despair. The wheel-barrows were easily disposed of--nor was there much greater difficulty with the gigs and shandrydans. But the hackney-coaches stood confoundedly in the way--and a wagon, drawn by four horses, and heaped up to the very sky with beer-barrels, like the Tower of Babel or Babylon, did indeed give us pause--but ere we had leisure to ruminate on the shortness of human life, we broke through between the leaders and the wheels with a crash of leathern breeching, dismounted collars, riven harness, and tumbling of enormous horses that was perilous to hear; when, as Sin and Satan would have it--would you believe it?--there, twenty kilts deep at the least, was the same accursed Highland regiment, the forty-second, with fixed bayonets, and all its pipers in the van, the pibroch yelling, squeaking, squealing, grunting, growling, roaring, as if it had only that very instant broken out--so, suddenly to the right--about went the bag-pipe-haunted mare, and away up the Mound, past the pictures of Irish Giants--Female Dwarfs--Albinos--an Elephant endorsed with towers--Tigers and Lions of all sorts--and a large wooden building, like a pyramid, in which there was the thundering of cannon--for the battle, we rather think, of Camperdown was going on--the Bank of Scotland seemed to sink into the NorLoch--one gleam through the window of the eyes of the Director-General--and to be sure how we did make the street-stalls of the Lawn-market spin! The man in St. Giles's steeple was playing his one o'clock tune on the bells, heedless in that elevation of our career--in less than no time John Knox, preaching from a house half-way down the Canongate, gave us the go-by--and down through one long wide sprawl of men, women, and children we wheeled past the Gothic front, and round the south angle of Holyrood, and across the King's-park, where wan and withered sporting debtors held up their hands and cried, Hurra--hurra--hurra--without stop or stay, up the rocky way that leads to St. Anthony's Well and Chapel--and now it was manifest that we were bound for the summit of Arthur's Seat. We hope that we were sufficiently thankful that a direction was not taken towards Salisbury Crags, where we should have been dashed into many million pieces. Free now from even the slightest suburban impediment,