I fancy that I still can hear him laugh.

There was something heart-breaking in this gradual declension at so advanced an age; you would have thought a man of sixty out of the reach of these calamities; you would have thought that he was niched by that time into a safe place in life, whence he could pass quietly and honourably into the grave.
One of the earliest marks of these _degringolades_ is, that the victim begins to disappear from the New Town thoroughfares, and takes to the High Street, like a wounded animal to the woods.

And such an one is the type of the quarter.

It also has fallen socially.

A scutcheon over the door somewhat jars in sentiment where there is a washing at every window.
The old man, when I saw him last, wore the coat in which he had played the gentleman three years before; and that was just what gave him so pre-eminent an air of wretchedness.
[Picture: High Street] It is true that the over-population was at least as dense in the epoch of lords and ladies, and that now-a-days some customs which made Edinburgh notorious of yore have been fortunately pretermitted.