Nor is the town so large but a holiday schoolboy may harry a bird's nest within half a mile of his own door.

There are places that still smell of the plough in memory's nostrils.

Here, one had heard a blackbird on a hawthorn; there, another was taken on summer evenings to eat strawberries and cream; and you have seen a waving wheatfield on the site of your present residence.

The memories of an Edinburgh boy are but partly memories of the town.

I look back with delight on many an escalade of garden walls; many a ramble among lilacs full of piping birds; many an exploration in obscure quarters that were neither town nor country; and I think that both for my companions and myself, there was a special interest, a point of romance, and a sentiment as of foreign travel, when we hit in our excursions on the butt-end of some former hamlet, and found a few rustic cottages embedded among streets and squares.