"Yes," said Mr. Townshend, leaning forward to look at the river. "Edinburgh, of course, has the Forth. I've been reading _Edinburgh Revisited_--you know it, I suppose?--and last week when I was there I spent some hours wandering about the 'lands' in the Old Town. I like Bone's description of the old rooms filled with men and women of degree dancing minuets under guttering sconces. You remember he talks of a pause in the dance, when the musicians tuned their fiddles, and ladies turned white shoulders and towering powdered heads to bleak barred windows to meet the night wind blowing saltly from the Forth? I think that gives one such a feeling of Edinburgh." "I know. I remember that," said Elizabeth. "Doesn't James Bone make pictures with words?" "Oh! It's extraordinary. The description of George Square as an elegant old sedan-chair gently decaying, with bright glass still in its lozenge-panels! I like the idea of the old inhabitants of the Square one after another through the generations coming back each to his own old grey-brown house--such a company of wit and learning and bravery." "And Murray of Broughton," she cried, her grey eyes shining with interest, "Murray, booted and cloaked and muffled to the eyes, coming down the steps of No. 25 and the teacup flying after him, and the lame little boy creeping out and picking up the saucer, because Traitor Murray meant to him history and romance! Yes.... But it isn't quite tactful of you to dilate on Edinburgh when I am trying to rouse in you some enthusiasm for Glasgow. You think of Edinburgh as some lovely lady of old years draped as with a garment by memories of unhappy far-off things. But you haven't seen her suburbs! No romance there. Rows and rows of smug, well-built houses, each with a front garden, each with a front gate, and each front gate remains shut against the casual caller until you have rung a bell--and the occupants have had time to make up their minds about you from behind the window curtains--when some mechanism in the vestibule is set in motion, the gate opens, and you walk in. That almost seems to me the most typical thing about Edinburgh. Glasgow doesn't keep visitors at the gate. Glasgow is on the doorstep to welcome them in. It is just itself--cheerful, hard-working, shrewd, kindly, a place that, like Weir of Hermiston, has no call to be bonny: it gets through its day's work. Edinburgh calls Glasgow vulgar, and on the surface we are vulgar. We say 'Ucha,' and when we meet each other in July we think it is funny to say 'A good New Year'; and always our accent grates on the ears of the genteel. I have heard it said that nothing could make Glasgow people gentlefolks because we are 'that weel-pleased'; and the less apparent reason there seems for complacency the more 'weel-pleased' we are. As an Edinburgh man once said to me in that connection, 'If a Glasgow man has black teeth and bandy legs he has cheek enough to stand before the King.' But we have none of the