SATURDAY NIGHT IN THE OLD TOWN OF EDINBURGH.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 3042, 6 November 1871, Page 3

SATURDAY NIGHT IN THE OLD TOWN OF EDINBURGH.

The special correspondent of the Daily News in Edinburgh during the meeting of the British Association in that city, writes

as follows :-—

There is nothing more picturesque in Europe than the aspect which the Old Town of Edinburgh presents from Princes street, with the grey old castle on its massive rock. On the left the ridge extends downwards, its: sky line broken by turrets and gables hoary with age j but the grand old houses in the narrow wynds and close* have long since become the habitations- of the poorest of the poor and the lowest of the low. Badly off as is London for suitable dwellibgs for her poor working classes, Edinburgh is in an infinitely worse condition, and this condition is intensified by the circumstance that while the houses of London inhabited. by such classes are for the most part comparatively modern, the poor of Edinburgh are picked and huddled into the huge antique pfles of the Old Town, where cleanliness, and*, indeed, common decency, are physical inspossibilities.

At 11 last night my guide met me under; the shadow of St. Giles's Church. The High . street public-houses were closing slowly; and > reluctantly discharging their occupants. On the pavement the throng was alreadjy dense ; and noisy. Sobriety was the exception-,,not»th& j rule. Some staggered stolidly along, mut-l tering imbecile drivel to themselves as they lurched to- and fro ; others, mad-druidr,; fought, and yelled^ and cursed.. Women? were the worst—ragged, barefoot, unsexedi;: wretches, with tangled hair, bosoms half) bare, mouths full of, the most terribleS blasphemies. Some of them had children in ? their arms, whom it seemed as if they must drop at every stagger. One miserable creature, with scarce clothes enough, to be; decent^ was picked up out of a foul gutter; by the police and taken off to the cells, a: policeman carrying the babe, which his mate had stumbled over when picking iip the' mother. The most piteous sight of all was •to watch the children round the groups that fought and [cursed, now scattering as ] some one, becoming rabid, ran amuck wildly at everything, now closing up again round two who came to close grips, tearing each other, even sometimes biting like beasts. The children with timorous hands would clutch the rags of a parent, and plead, whenever a chance seemed to offer, *' Come awa, mither," or " Dinna bide, father." Not less pathetic was it to see a little one keeping patient, weary watch by the mouth of the close over A parent, and striving to avert the attention of the police from the "drunk and incapable" creature. Sensuality held carnival. An attempt to analyze the -medley of sound, was impossible ; it could not be noteft w'ilh what fearful bitterness the curses came out. A drunken London mob curse lavishly, but in its oaths there is a vague aimlessness which gives: a listenerthe idea they are mere expletives. But the whisky-maddened people of the High street cursed each other with* a hot fervour, a lurid intensity/that made one's flesh creep. Quitting the pandemonium of the High street,, we passed down the Westbow into the Grass-market. A fight was raging on the spot where the mob hanged Porteous. The guide, shouldering past a Crowd of drunken^ dirty wretches, led the way into a narrow passage which bears the name of Gilmour's -. close. TM walls of tfie court had been covered with a coat of whitewash; but its broken pavement reeked a^aih with nastiness, and the smells were horrible. Two haggard bel--dames that were furiously cursing each other as they foughtj desisted from both pastimes when they saw my guide, and greeted him with tipsy familiarity. Turning to the left, we entered at once a dirty kitchen crowded with drunken beggars, male and female. We groped our way up the foul and broken staircase into a labyrinth of squalid rooms above, littered with dirty beds and sihellihg inexpressibly foul. In one room two men and a woman were making rough preparations for going to bed. The woman had a bed to herself. In reply to my question, she : said she knew nothing of the men who were to occupy the same room with her, and had never seen them before. In another room a mother and child were in bed. -,' * Where's your husband ?' asked my companion " I havna a husband," was the reply. " Who is the father of your child?" " De'il kens," answered the woman with a half drunken laugh. Sleep was impossible for any one in such a den on account of the din of fighting i and screaming below, the rolling about and imprecations of drunken people everywhere, and the wailing of forlorn children. Quitting a place not fit for pigs, we passed into j another close, and ascending to the top of a narrow, tortuous, broken, and dirty staircase* entered a foul low-roofed room containing not a scrap of furniture. In each corner w^ a little heap of dirty straw,, on which nestled, tangled in strange confusion, some children. It was impossible to tell how many, but was easy to tell that all were dirty, sore, covered and infested with vermin. By thelo^fird crouched twd crones, both drunk and loquacious; and lower down in the same house we entered a room, the walls of whioh, rotten and full of cracks, were matted with torn layers of mouldy paper swarming with vermin. Across the centre of the low ceiling ran a beam, sp bent and strained that it was amazing it had not broken long ago. Gaping holes hi the floor were filled up by great stones, and moonlight wa3 visible through the fissures, in the walls. In another room, dirty as a pigstye, lay a bundle of foul rags, which we were; told was a woman " that had taken a drap j" her feet lay in the heap which was swept hi the comer —ashes, filth, herring bones, and muck miscellaneous. Her head was in perilous proximity to a fire that burnt between too loose stones. _

: Down the dirty stairs, and up another winding sfcair still, dirtier and more broken, we had to pass through drunken crowds fighting and yelling in the narrow squalid court. At the top of the rieketty stairs we entered a place which cannot be called a room, roofed in by the bare rafters; only where they joined was there standing room for even a small man. Here we found a widow and eight children living on a parish allowance of five shillings a week. The children were half nude and horribly filthy. Savages live a more cleanly life than this. Yet another stair in the same close we ascended, right to the top, stumbling over heaps of rubbish, slipping among oozy filth, till we reached a dog-hole under the rafters. Going first, my guide, for the place was nowhere more than three feet high, stumbled over a woman squatted all of aheap. " Who are you ?" A grunt. Hcshiftiik the creature by the dingy rag on her shoulders, and with a curse she slowly turned to us her bloated face, with a pipo stuck between the lips. "What brings you here ?" " I dinna ken." "Do you live here?" "Na;" and then, with another grunt, she turned her face, j away and would answer no more ques- j tions. There was at least one other living being up in this loathsome sky-parlour, ; As my guide tried a low door fastened with a padlock, a child on the further side set up a dismal cry for "mither." Whether the creature outside was the wretched child's ''mither," or whether she was one of the crowd whose drunken imprecations reached us even at the height we stood, it was impossible to tell. We had to leave the child weeping for the "mither " that never came, and go further. Thus much for "Miss Aird's-lane " and " Court." We turned now f>r the Cowgate. Before the house in which Henry Brougham's parents lived, a medley of men and women, not a sober soul among them, surged round a couple of women who were tearing each othsr's faces with their nails. In an old house with a carved coat of arms above the door-way we found grownup men and women sleeping together on the same bundle of rags and straw. And now we Avere at the "Old Meal Market Stairs. From each landing, passages branched out like the galleries in a coal-pit, winding iv and out in seemingly endless coils among the rooms separated by rotten, vermin-

haunted partitions. It was nearly two in the morning, but the place throbbed again with the noise of devilry; drunken men and women tumbled about the dark' and tortuous passages, shouting incoherent imprecations, and Wanting even in the instinct which teaches a wild beast its way to its own den. Shouts of murder came from one room, where a gaunt Irishman, mad drunk, was throttling his wife, who was drunk too, and tore. at his eyes with her nails. Through an open door were visible a couple cf dead drunk, half-naked women, lying on the bare floor. Through the smashed panel of another came the strains of a dirty chorus howled in maudlfet male and female yokes. Higher up the scenes ; were the same, right' to the rooms on the top of the house,, lit only by narrow skylights that cannot be opened. In these single j stairs there live, 1 was informed, not f ewer i than 150 families, besides lodgers. In such a I place, unprovided with the commonest ap^ pliancesof civilizatknj„deeency is as impossible' as quietude': there can be no domesticity in such a hell-hole, and the very thought of domesticity, the realization of the meaning of the word home, seems banished utterly from its dismal interior,- From house to house, from close to close, from wynd to wynd, we pursued our peregrinations, meeting ever with similar horrors. True, there were variations. Now it was a Shebeen brothel, knownas" Gulf," whe*e hideous women made merry, under the auspices of a woman had who had been in gaol so of ten that she had lost the count. Now it was a squalid thieves' lodging-house, bein^ rummaged by the police, its inmates all in a flutter of terror. "Now a cellar, where a Wan mother, .sitting in a horror :of great darkness, bent '■ over a child dying on the bare boards; and still ever,'as we einerged'from close or wynd, into the High street, or Cqwgate; the discordant din was unabated, ceaseless, :till after the'pure Sabbath morn had risen On the impure and disgusting Scene.. But the details would be wearisome, and the subject is not a pleasant one. A day in the British Association for the Advancement of Science and a night in the Old Town of Edinburgh, which may be broadly described as an engine for the advancement of vice,'misery, disease^ and a general God-forgottenness, is axurious and a-suggestive contrast. ;