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Updated: June 24, 2025
Both he and they were distinctly in my view, and never within speech of each other, until he vanished into one of the wynds leading towards the bottom of the High Street, at which precise time the two strangers came below my window; so that it was quite dear he neither could be one of them nor have any communication with them.
Had Inneraora been a walled town, impregnable, say, as a simple Swabian village with a few sconces and redoubts, and a few pieces of cannon, we old soldiers would have counselled the holding of it against all comers; but it was innocently open to the world, its back windows looking into the fields, its through-going wynds and closes leading frankly to the highway.
Hew, persisted his trembling comrade; 'they all perished to a man! This was not destined to be the fate of the Edinburgh volunteers. On the march down the West Bow, one by one they stole off, up the narrow wynds and doorways, till by the time they reached the West Port, only the student corps remained, and even its ranks were sadly thinned.
Dwellers in the tenements darted up wynds and blind closes, climbed twisting turnpike stairs to windy roosts under the gables, or they scuttled through noble doors into foul courts and hallways. Beggars and pickpockets swarmed under the arches of the bridge, to swell the evil smelling human river that flowed at the dark and slimy bottom of the Cowgate.
After a walk through as many obscure and filthy wynds and lanes and alleys and courts as ever were threaded by some humble fugitive from justice, the patient Morris came to a sort of court, situated among the miserable hovels in the vicinity of the Tower.
He "braw'd it," as he says, with no doubt the finest of periwigs, long before he had ceased to be a skull-thatcher, and swaggered through the wynds and about the Cross with the best. The Edinburgh shopkeeper has never been "blate."
We saw only one or two which had any spare space associated with them, to form either a court-yard or a piece of garden-ground. Space is indeed the great want of Venice. Many of the canals, dividing lines of houses as lofty as those of the Old Town of Edinburgh, are not wider than the wynds of that celebrated city.
There are numbers of such localities in the heart of the city, south of the Trongate, westward from the Saltmarket, in Calton and off the High Street, endless labyrinths of lanes or wynds into which open at almost every step, courts or blind alleys, formed by ill-ventilated, high-piled, waterless, and dilapidated houses. These are literally swarming with inhabitants.
Once we saw a man, who seemed not quite sober, passing along a street in front of us. But we hid in a door till he had disappeared up an opening such as there are here, steep little closes, or 'wynds', as they call them in Scotland. My heart beat so loud all the time sometimes I thought I should faint.
The very next morning he had gone down into the perilous Cowgate, and inquired in every place where it might be possible for such a timid old shepherd to be known. But there! As well look for a burr thistle in a bin of oats, as look for a human atom in the Cowgate and the wynds "juist aff." "Weel, noo, ye couldna hae dune aething wi' the auld body, ava, gin he wouldna gang to the infairmary."
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