WINTER VIEWS Or EDINBURGH.

Otago Witness, Issue 2612, 6 April 1904, Page 70

WINTER VIEWS Or EDINBURGH.

By Editti Seaelk Gkossjianx, M.A.

Summer is the favourite time amongst tourists for visiting Edinburgh, but if I were a reasonably healthy tourist from the Scuthern Hemisphere I should choose the winter. There is a beauty, indeed, in this pale misty summer ; but it is commonplace beside the wonderfully varied aspects of winter — atmospheric effects and tones of colour altogether new, strange, and fascinating to a New Zealander or an Australian. I might almost call them sub-Arctic as compared with oui climates. And yet Edinburgh cold, though often intense, is not so unhealthy as the clammy chill of London. — In November Fogs. — On a spur of rock at the foot of the castled crag is an old ruined guardhouse o f King David 11, and an ancient arched gateway, where his men-at-arms must have marched in and out in the distant centuries. Nothing remains but this jutting fragment of the tower and this old arch. I sat by it once iiz a black November fog ; it seems the very atmosphere of antiquity, full of mysterious suggestions. The withered leaves lay on the path, an old gardener working near. The leafless branches of the trees showed black with the city's smoke. High above rose the black side of the giant rock and the dim line of the castle walls. Bdlow was the 'hollow where the Nor' Loch once lay, and there the fog lay thickest and blackest. Beyond, as if an immeasurable distance away, dim shapes of the modern, town loomed vaguely — a few lamps twinkling in its street, though it was noonday. —At toe West End.— The fog is dark and grimy, but in the West End evening you could almost forget it, or think of it only as the dull oackground on which the brightest colours are painted. All the pleasure-seekers have coma to' town, the fragment of Scotland's old nobility that still clings to the venerable capital, and this quarter is, decked out in its brightest for their benefit. The shops are bright with globes of electric light and flickering points of gas, and all have displayed their best goods. As you pass you catch glimpses of pictures and toys and jewels, of antique furniture and of gauzy, tinselled ballroom gowns. The fruit shops are loaded with the choicest pineapples, red apples, and large blue grapes. And the flowers ! To see a florist's window in this murky autumn evening is W feel oneself bewitched. Great crimson boughs of oak and scarlet rowan, great fleshy orchids — white and lilac and spotted, tawny brown and gold, — incurved and Japanese chrysanthemums side by side with, delicate blush roses, and in. amongst green, moss the exquisite prays of lilies-of-the-valley. In the summer there is nothing much to see in the shops, but in winter they are radiant. —In Fog and Frost. — And now it is December, and we are deep in winter. There is a frost-fog in the sky, and the sun glowers through it with a light like -what we see on summer days in Australia through the dense smoke of bush fires. A blocd-red sunbeam strikes upon the wall. Deep down below from j the window of my lofty flat I see the frozen streets and steep waills of stone, and on ' the south, the whitened walks and grass of the meadows. That ineffectual sun will not melt theon : all day and all night street and meadows will go on freezing, striking cold to your feet as you walk. The fog is white, like white smoke, and is the usual companion of the frost. I stood once on the Bridge of Dean on the afternoon of such a. day as this. The village lay aid frozen, deep down below that great wide arch ; sunless and cold, with white rime on the roofs and on its queer, narrow, little streets, and white rime "covering the pleasure grounds and the little Greek temple ovei St. Bernard's Well. It seemed as if all life had forsaken it, except for the murmuring brown Water of Leith. Coming back along Princes street I saw a beautifufl effect: the dense, chill filling the ravine below the Mound and the bridges, and, -rifdng up as if' from thin ghostly water, the lovely group of towers and spires, just traceable on the heignt, and tinged with the red glow of the sun. — After Rain. — Then came day after day of winter rain, and the sides washed themselves jlear of smoke and fog, and the city looked like a "fair penitent" who has got absolution — if a Presbyterian stronghold could look like anything "so Papistical!. In the early Northern sunset the sky was a chill pure blue and pale rose, and the wet grey walls reflected the tints, their turieted and spired summits rising in the air in delicate, lovely outlines. Then it grew milder, and the mist changed its tone again to something between, white and grey-blue, and m the soft afternoon light the palatial shops on the Bridge and the domed LTniversity shimmered a pearly grey, the sun touching theii projections- through the mist. There is yet another hue r t takes on, this jkangeful Edinburgh mist, and it is one that has been reproduced in some handpainted pictures of the city which unisb seem unreal to those who know it only in its summer aspects. I saw it best once in the giloaming, when the fog-mist rose, not in one uniform atmosphere, but in cloudlike masses, dyed violet-blue :nd violet-rose. ■ — In the Snow. — • T woka up in the morning to' see the snow lying on the narrow causeway and on the high, dingy-grey houses, and in front whitening the grass of the meadows, and heaped lip on the pathways, where the black figures of children were snowballing each other. It drifted on to the upper side of each branch of the great trees, outlining them in Mack and white against a sky that pale and yet gloomy. Snow fell all the' night of the New Year, and next day, when I went abroad into the streets, the shoulders of the MQs were

glistening through the mist. In Prirces street, all along 'the Mound and Castlehill, the Castle and the Rock, the rows of roofs had every ridge piled with snow, while their wet sides showed black against it ; they, like the

Buttress and buttress alternately Seemed framed of ebon and ivory.

At night I watched the skating on Craiglockhart, the dark figures gliding and turning on the frozen pond, the hill above with its great bare forest trees, and the whole scene lit by a row of foot Camps and one blazing flame. But best of all was the walk along the frozen road, past country houses where the dark ivy hung p gainst the snow-topped walls and roofs. We walked by the side of the frozen canal, factory flames gleaming acro&s an unlit waste, and a clouded moon looking down on it all.