Chapter 9 - Page 2

themselves suffered the
thing in the body, can the gloom and depression of our
Edinburgh winter be brought home. For some constitutions
there is something almost physically disgusting in the
bleak ugliness of easterly weather; the wind wearies, the
sickly sky depresses them; and they turn back from their
walk to avoid the aspect of the unrefulgent sun going
down among perturbed and pallid mists. The days are so
short that a man does much of his business, and certainly
all his pleasure, by the haggard glare of gas lamps. The
roads are as heavy as a fallow. People go by, so
drenched and draggle-tailed that I have often wondered
how they found the heart to undress. And meantime the
wind whistles through the town as if it were an open
meadow; and if you lie awake all night, you hear it
shrieking and raving overhead with a noise of shipwrecks
and of falling houses. In a word, life is so unsightly
that there are times when the heart turns sick in a man's
inside; and the look of a tavern, or the thought of the
warm, fire-lit study, is like the touch of land to one
who has been long struggling with the seas.

As the weather hardens towards frost, the world
begins to improve for Edinburgh people. We enjoy superb,
sub-arctic sunsets, with the profile of the city stamped
in indigo upon a sky of luminous green. The wind may
still be cold, but there is a briskness in the air that
stirs good blood. People do not all look equally sour
and downcast. They fall into two divisions: one, the
knight of the blue face and hollow paunch, whom Winter
has gotten by the vitals; the other well lined with New-
year's fare, conscious of the touch of cold on his
periphery, but stepping through it by the glow of his
internal fires. Such an one I remember, triply cased in
grease, whom no extremity of temperature could vanquish.
'Well,' would be his jovial salutation, 'here's a
sneezer!' And the look of these warm fellows is tonic,
and upholds their drooping fellow-townsmen. There is yet
another class who do not depend on corporal advantages,
but support the winter in virtue of a brave and merry
heart. One shivering evening, cold enough for frost but
with too high a wind, and a little past sundown, when the
lamps were beginning to enlarge their circles in the
growing dusk, a brace of barefoot lassies were seen
coming eastward in the teeth of the wind. If the one was
as much as nine, the other was certainly not more than
seven. They were miserably clad; and the pavement was so
cold, you would have thought no one could lay a naked
foot on it unflinching. Yet they came along waltzing, if
you please, while the elder sang a tune to give them
music. The person who saw this, and whose heart was