On the following morning, by the break of day, we took shipping in the
steam-boat for Glasgow. I had misgivings about the engine, which is
really a thing of great docility; but saving my concern for the boiler,
we all found the place surprising comfortable. The day was bleak and
cold; but we had a good fire in a carron grate in the middle of the
floor, and books to read, so that both body and mind are therein provided
for.
Among the books, I fell in with a History of the Rebellion, anent the
hand that an English gentleman of the name of Waverley had in it. I was
grieved that I had not time to read it through, for it was wonderful
interesting, and far more particular, in many points, than any other
account of that affair I have yet met with; but it's no so friendly to
Protestant principles as I could have wished. However, if I get my
legacy well settled, I will buy the book, and lend it to you on my
return, please God, to the manse.
We were put on shore at Glasgow by breakfast-time, and there we tarried
all day, as I had a power of attorney to get from Miss Jenny Macbride, my
cousin, to whom the colonel left the thousand pound legacy. Miss Jenny
thought the legacy should have been more, and made some obstacle to
signing the power; but both her lawyer and Andrew Pringle, my son,
convinced her, that, as it was specified in the testament, she could not
help it by standing out; so at long and last Miss Jenny was persuaded to
put her name to the paper.
Next day we all four got into a fly coach, and, without damage or
detriment, reached this city in good time for dinner in Macgregor's
hotel, a remarkable decent inn, next door to one Mr. Blackwood, a civil
and discreet man in the bookselling line.
Really the changes in Edinburgh since I was here, thirty years ago, are
not to be told. I am confounded; for although I have both heard and read
of the New Town in the Edinburgh Advertiser, and the Scots Magazine,
I had no notion of what has come to pass. It's surprising to think
wherein the decay of the nation is; for at Greenock I saw nothing but
shipping and building; at Glasgow, streets spreading as if they were one
of the branches of cotton-spinning; and here, the houses grown up as if
they were sown in the seed-time with the corn, by a drill-machine, or
dibbled in rigs and furrows like beans and potatoes.