Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 24, 2025
Their doors closed against me, and the spell was broken. Edinburgh is full of interesting localities; particularly the old town. In its ancient "wynds and closes," now tenanted by the veriest of the plebeian race, in former days resided men of the most distinguished rank and celebrity.
Meanwhile, it was a comfort to one fresh from the cities of the Old World, and the short and stunted figures, the mesquin and scrofulous visages, which crowd our alleys and back wynds, to see everywhere health, strength, and goodly stature, especially among women.
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.
On each side narrow wynds and lanes descend down steep slopes, on the south side to the Grassmarket and the Cowgate, on the north at the time of which we write the sides of the city sloped down to a lake called the Norloch, a strong position, had the city been properly fortified.
Of Fergusson, he had, in early youth, the waywardness, the liking for taverns and tavern talk, the half-rueful appreciation of the old closes and wynds of Old Edinburgh, a touch of the recklessness and more than all the pictorial power which, in Fergusson, Burns so magnanimously admired.
When she reached her capital there were few welcoming cheers; but as she rode over the cobblestones to Holyrood, the squalid wynds vomited forth great mobs of hard-featured, grim-visaged men and women who stared with curiosity and a half-contempt at the girl queen and her retinue of foreigners.
A narrow street with dreadful "wynds" and "vennels" running back from it was the High street of Glasgow at the time my story opens.
Even the cheaper booths that adorned the West Bow or smaller wynds, where the country women bought their kirtles of red or green when they brought their produce to the market, would show more gay colours under their shade in a season than we with our soberer taste in years; and the town ladies, in their hoods and silk gowns, which were permitted even in more primitive times to the possessors of so much a year, must have been of themselves a fair sight in all their ornaments, less veiled and muffled from profane view than more high-born dames and demoiselles.
Women sat or stood at windows, or passed in and out of dark wynds, or, escorted, picked their way at street crossings. Now and then went by a sedan-chair. Many women showed in their faces a truly religious fervor, a passionate Jacobite loyalty, lighting like a flame. Many sewed white cockades. All Scotland, all England, would surely presently want these!
Word Of The Day
Others Looking