We were sitting rather negligently on an infernal animal, which, up to
that day, had seemed quiet as a lamb--kissing our hand to Mrs.
Davison, then Miss Duncan, and in the blaze of her fame, when a
Highland regiment, no doubt the forty-second, that had been trudging
down the Mound, so silently that we never heard them, all at once, and
without the slightest warning, burst out, with all their bag-pipes,
into one pibroch! The mare--to do her justice--had been bred in
England, and ridden, as a charger, by an adjutant to an English
regiment. She was even fond of music--and delighted to prance behind
the band--unterrified by cymbals or great drum. She never moved in a
roar of artillery at reviews--and, had the Castle of Edinburgh--Lord
bless it--been self-involved, at that moment, in a storm of thunder
and lightning, round its entire circle of cannon, that mare would not
so much as have pricked up her ears, whisked her tail, or lifted
a hoof. But the pibroch was more than horse-flesh and blood could
endure--and off we two went like a whirlwind. Where we went--that is
to say, what were the names of the few first streets along which
we were borne, is a question which, as a man of veracity, we must
positively decline answering. For some short space of time, lines of
houses reeled by without a single face at the windows--and these,
we have since conjectured, might be North and South Hanover street,
and Queen-street. By and by we surely were in something like a
square--could it be Charlotte-square?--and round and round it we
flew--three, four, five, or six times, as horsemen do at the
Caledonian amphitheatre--for the animal had got blind with terror, and
kept viciously reasoning in a circle. What a show of faces at all the
windows then! A shriek still accompanied us as we clattered, and
thundered, and lightened along; and, unless our ears lied, there were
occasional fits of stifled laughter, and once or twice a guffaw; for
there was now a ringing of lost stirrups--and much holding of the
mane. One complete round was executed by us, first on the shoulder
beyond the pommel; secondly, on the neck; thirdly, between the ears;
fourthly, between the forelegs, in a place called the counter, with
our arms round the jugular veins of the flying phenomenon, and our
toes in the air. That was, indeed, the crisis of our fever, but we
made a wonderful recovery back into the saddle--righting like a boat
capsized in a sudden squall at sea--and once more, with accelerated
speed, away past the pillared front of St. George's church!
The castle and all its rocks, in peristrephic panorama, then floated
cloud-like by--and we saw the whole mile-length of Prince's-street
stretched before us, studded with innumerable coaches, chaises,
chariots, carts, wagons, drays, gigs, shandrydans, and wheel-barrows,
through among which we dashed, as if they had been as much
gingerbread--while men on horseback were seen flinging themselves off,
and drivers dismounting in all directions, making their escape up
flights of steps and common stairs--mothers or nurses with broods of
young children flying hither and thither in distraction, or standing
on the very crown of the causeway, wringing their hands in despair.
The wheel-barrows were easily disposed of--nor was there much greater
difficulty with the gigs and shandrydans. But the hackney-coaches
stood confoundedly in the way--and a wagon, drawn by four horses, and
heaped up to the very sky with beer-barrels, like the Tower of Babel
or Babylon, did indeed give us pause--but ere we had leisure to
ruminate on the shortness of human life, we broke through between the
leaders and the wheels with a crash of leathern breeching, dismounted
collars, riven harness, and tumbling of enormous horses that was
perilous to hear; when, as Sin and Satan would have it--would you
believe it?--there, twenty kilts deep at the least, was the same
accursed Highland regiment, the forty-second, with fixed bayonets, and
all its pipers in the van, the pibroch yelling, squeaking, squealing,
grunting, growling, roaring, as if it had only that very instant
broken out--so, suddenly to the right--about went the bag-pipe-haunted
mare, and away up the Mound, past the pictures of Irish Giants--Female
Dwarfs--Albinos--an Elephant endorsed with towers--Tigers and Lions of
all sorts--and a large wooden building, like a pyramid, in which there
was the thundering of cannon--for the battle, we rather think, of
Camperdown was going on--the Bank of Scotland seemed to sink into
the NorLoch--one gleam through the window of the eyes of the
Director-General--and to be sure how we did make the street-stalls of
the Lawn-market spin! The man in St. Giles's steeple was playing his
one o'clock tune on the bells, heedless in that elevation of our
career--in less than no time John Knox, preaching from a house
half-way down the Canongate, gave us the go-by--and down through one
long wide sprawl of men, women, and children we wheeled past the
Gothic front, and round the south angle of Holyrood, and across the
King's-park, where wan and withered sporting debtors held up their
hands and cried, Hurra--hurra--hurra--without stop or stay, up the
rocky way that leads to St. Anthony's Well and Chapel--and now it was
manifest that we were bound for the summit of Arthur's Seat. We hope
that we were sufficiently thankful that a direction was not taken
towards Salisbury Crags, where we should have been dashed into many
million pieces. Free now from even the slightest suburban impediment,
obstacle, or interruption, we began to eye our gradually rising
situation in life--and looking over our shoulder, the sight of city
and sea was indeed magnificent. There in the distance rose North
Berwick Law--but though we have plenty of time now for description, we
had scant time then for beholding perhaps the noblest scenery in
Scotland. Up with us--up with us into the clouds--and just as St.
Giles's bells ceased to jingle, and both girths broke, we crowned the
summit, and sat on horseback like king Arthur himself, eight hundred
feet above the level of the sea!
_Blackwood's Magazine_.
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