The Ayrshire Legatees

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.