general-assembly coat and et cetera’s were duly kept at home,--that is to say, in his two-shillings-a-week apartments, up seven pair of stairs, in College-street, or haply in the house of that town acquaintance with whom he had found cheaper board,--till the eventful days should arrive. Thus he was habited in his parson’s grey, the breast of which, where it projected beyond the perpendicular, bore testimony to the fall, both of broth and of punch, while his inferior regions were shaded and shielded by dark-olive velveteens, a little tarnished, worsted hose furrowed as neatly as the turnip-division of his glebe, and cow-skin shoes of the most damp-defying power, which borrowed no part of their lustre from Mr. Robert Warren. Still the good man was clean in his linen; his chin was shorn like a new-mowed field; his visage beamed forth gratitude for “a competent portion of the good things of this life;” and his plump and ruddy hands slumbered with much orthodox ease in the capacious pockets of the velveteens. Anon, a highland laird, whose _tail_ comprised only his lady and half a dozen of daughters, and who seemed to be meditating upon the roofless castle and ill-stored larder, to which the expense of parading full thirty-six feet of female charms before the King would subject him, during the weary moons of the Highland winter, hurried past, not at all at his ease. But, to describe the individuals, strongly marked as they were, would be altogether out of the question; and, indeed, to give any thing like even a sketch of the groups and classes and knots of men, women, and children, in all habits, of all ages, and in almost every variety of shape, would bankrupt even a German vocabulary, although in that language one be allowed, for clearness sake, to lump a score of sentences into a single epithet. The cry was still “they come,” and Caledonia, from fertile plain and far mountain,--from toiling city and tiresome wilderness,--from rock, and glen, and river,--upon the wings of the wind, urged on by steam, drawn in coach, chaise, waggon, cart, and hurdle, riding upon horses, mules, and donkeys, and running upon feet, shod and unshod,--came scudding and smoking, and creaking and crashing, and reeking and panting, in one conglomerating cloud, and one commingling din, to distract the attention from the attic glories of Edinburgh, and for a time drown her classic sounds in the discordant and untunable din of all the provinces. Here you had the broad shoulders and bold bearing of the borderer, delving an elbow, of the size and substance of a sirloin of beef, into the skinny ribs of an Aberdonian professor of humanity, who all the time kept squeaking like a sick fiddle, in response to the bellow of the other, which reminded you of a bull confined in the vaulted hall of an old castle. There grinned the fat face of an East Lothian farmer, between a Perth baillie on the one hand, and a Stonehaven scribe on the other,