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Updated: June 28, 2025
Trail said, at last, "the man wha lies here was a decent, pious auld country body, and I drove him to his meeserable death in the Cowgate." "Man, ye dinna ken what ye're sayin'!" was the shocked response. "Do I no'? I'm canny, by the ordinar', but my fule tongue will get me into trouble with the magistrates one of these days. It aye wags at both ends, and is no' tied in the middle."
Used as he was to following flocks up treacherous braes and through drifted glens, and surefooted as a collie, Auld Jock had to pick his way carefully over the slimy, ice-glazed cobble stones of the Cowgate. He could see nothing. The scattered gas-lamps, blurred by the wet, only made a timbered gallery or stone stairs stand out here and there or lighted up a Gothic gargoyle to a fantastic grin.
Once they lived in a very dark and dirty and crowded tenement, quite as bad as some that were torn down in the Cowgate and the Grassmarket." "It mak's ye fecht ane anither," said one laddie, soberly. "Gin they had a sonsie doggie like Bobby to lo'e, an' an auld kirkyaird wi' posies an' birdies to leuk into, they wadna fecht sae muckle." "I'm very sure of that.
Small merchants, students, clerks, factory workers, house servants, laborers and vendors, all honest and useful people, had come up out of these old tenements within Bobby's memory; and others had gone down, alas! into the Cowgate. But Bobby's tail wagged for these unfortunates, too, and some of them had no other friend in the world beside that uncalculating little dog.
There's nae coontin' the bairns o' the neeborhood, an' nane o' them are so weel broucht up as they micht be." Mr. Traill commented upon this philosophically: "A bairn is like a dog in mony ways. Tak' a stick to one or the other and he'll misbehave. The children here are poor and neglected, but they're no' vicious like the awfu' imps of the Cowgate, wha'd steal from their blind grandmithers.
Some prest hard to go thorow the chief Parts of the City as was done at the Revolution; but this we refused, considering that it looked airy and frothy, to make such Show of them, and inconsistent with the solid serious Observing of such an affecting, surprizing unheard-of Dispensation: But took the ordinary Way of other Burials from that Place, to wit, we went east the Back of the Wall, and in at BRISTO-PORT, and down the Way to the Head of the COWGATE, and turned up to the Church- yard, where they were interred closs to the Martyrs Tomb, with the greatest Multitude of People Old and Young, Men and Women, Ministers and others, that ever I saw together.
Moreover, the waiters at the Cowgate Port observed something like the trepidation of guilt in your conduct, and declare that you were the first to command them to open the gate, in a tone of authority, as if still presiding over the guards and out-posts of the rabble, who had besieged them the whole night."
Lairds and leddies, powdered, jeweled and satin-shod, were borne in sedan chairs down ten flights of stone stairs and through torch-lit courts and tunnel streets, to routs in Castle or Palace and to tourneys in the Grassmarket. From its low situation the Cowgate came in the course of time to smell to heaven, and out of it was a sudden exodus of grand folk to the northern hills.
DAVID HAGGART was born at Canonmills, with no richer birthright than thievish fingers and a left hand of surpassing activity. The son of a gamekeeper, he grew up a long-legged, red-headed callant, lurking in the sombre shadow of the Cowgate, or like the young Sir Walter, championing the Auld Town against the New on the slopes of Arthur's Seat.
One of the nine-steps was rendered more secure because the climber could take hold of the root of a nettle, so precarious were the means of passing this celebrated spot. The manning the Cowgate Port, especially in snowball time, was also a choice amusement, as it offered an inaccessible station for the boys who used these missiles to the annoyance of the passengers.
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