Businesses
that fatten on misfortune--the saloon, pawn, old clothes and
cheap food shops-lined the squalid Cowgate. Palaces were cut up
into honeycombs of tall tenements. Every stair was a crowded
highway; every passage a place of deposit for filth; almost every
room sheltered a half famished family, in darkness and ancient
dirt. Grand and great, pious and wise, decent, wretched and
terrible folk, of every sort, had preceded Auld Jock to his
lodging in a steep and narrow wynd, and nine gusty flights up
under a beautiful, old Gothic gable.
A wrought-iron lantern hanging in an arched opening, lighted the
entrance to the wynd. With a hand outstretched to either wall,
Auld Jock felt his way up. Another lantern marked a sculptured
doorway that gave to the foul court of the tenement. No sky could
be seen above the open well of the court, and the carved, oaken
banister of the stairs had to be felt for and clung to by one so
short of breath. On the seventh landing, from the exertion of the
long climb, Auld Jock was shaken into helplessness, and his heart
set to pounding, by a violent fit of coughing. Overhead a shutter
was slammed back, and an angry voice bade him stop "deaving
folk."
The last two flights ascended within the walls. The old man
stumbled into the pitch-black, stifling passage and sat down on
the lowest step to rest. On the landing above he must encounter
the auld wifie of a landlady, rousing her, it might be, and none
too good-tempered, from sleep.
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