In fact, from this point of view, Edinburgh is not so much a small city as the largest of small towns.

It is scarce possible to avoid observing your neighbours; and I never yet heard of any one who tried.

It has been my fortune, in this anonymous accidental way, to watch more than one of these downward travellers for some stages on the road to ruin.

One man must have been upwards of sixty before I first observed him, and he made then a decent, personable figure in broad-cloth of the best.

For three years he kept falling--grease coming and buttons going from the square-skirted coat, the face puffing and pimpling, the shoulders growing bowed, the hair falling scant and grey upon his head; and the last that ever I saw of him, he was standing at the mouth of an entry with several men in moleskin, three parts drunk, and his old black raiment daubed with mud.