wire, and that the lightning itself is paraffin!
Never. Let me keep at least one disenchanted
corner in my memory of the theatre.

I bend my steps towards the street where I
lived when I was a student. There is a railway
station at the end of it now. The railway had
not come so far north in my day, and when we
travelled it was by the mail-coach, with a guard
in a red coat blowing a horn behind. The railway,
I see, has respectfully stopped at the end
of my street, but whether out of regard for me,
or in consequence of the elevated nature of the
situation, I will not stay to inquire. Even with
this alteration in the aspect of the place I could
find my way to number eleven blindfold. This
must be the house — yes, this is the house,
notwithstanding that it has been converted into a
shop for the sale of whisky to be drunk on the
premises. Had it been otherwise, I might have
had some delicacy about asking permission to
view my old abode. As it is, I walk in and
order half a gill, which is brought to me in the
very apartment where I was formerly accustomed
to drink — I will not say deeply — of the waters
of the Pierian spring. There was my grate: I
knew its pattern: there was my brass
gaspipe: I knew its twist. There was the recess in
which stood my box bed. It was a "press" now
for whisky-bottles and gill-stoups! What am
I to make of this? The student's lodging-
house turned into a shebeen. Bacchus sitting
in the chair of Minerva. Is this a symptom
of the decline and fall of Aberdeen? "Well;
no, I think not. The simple fact is, that a
public-house was wanted here to accommodate
the officials employed at the railway. But how
easy it would be for me to say that it was the
direct consequence of the decline of learning
and morals. A university had been swept away,
and there were no students to take lodgings. So
grossness stepped in and turned the homes of
the students into dram-shops. It would look
very feasible. And is it not in such fashion
that history is sometimes written? I have been
walking through unfrequented by-streets in
order to have my own company. You cannot
muse when any one is by your side talking to
you. A single word uttered by a known voice
breaks the spell of your reverie, and presto!
your pleasant waking dream has fled. Thus on
turning the corner of iny street, I am saluted
with— "Ha, how d'ye do; welcome back to
Scotland," and I awake at once to hard realities.
And the realities here are very hard indeed.

If the world last long enough, Aberdeen will
assuredly come to be known as the Eternal City;
and, physically at least, it will have as good a
claim as Rome to that title. If they escape fire,
there is no reason why the houses in Union-
street should not last for a thousand years.
They are built entirely of granite, and the walls
are three times as thick as those of the best
brick houses which are now being built in
London. And while they will last for many
centuries, their outer walls will remain as white
and clean as when they were first erected. The
smoke which settles upon them one day, is
washed off by the rain the next. The boasted
endurance of marble is nothing to that of
granite. Marble crumbles and cracks after a
century or two, and its whiteness is dimmed in
a few short years. Granite lasts for ever, and
every storm of wind and rain renews its pristine
brightness. Houses which Dr. Johnson saw and
admired are as stable and as white and clean as
they were a hundred years ago. "They build
almost wholly with granite," said the doctor;
"which is well known not to want hardness."
No, indeed, hardness is exactly what it does not
want; and why the learned doctor, who was a
Dictionary-maker, and prided himself upon his
English, could not have said in a straightforward
manner that "it was very hard," I cannot imagine.
"It is beautiful," he adds, and "must be very lasting.
"Dr. Johnson was three days in Aberdeen,
and did not care to inquire what was the staple of
its trade; albeit he received the freedom of the
city, with liberty to set up shop within its
precincts. All that he says about the town is, that
it has two universities and an English church,
and that the women of the lower class are visibly
employed in knitting stockings. Yet Aberdeen
was no insignificant place even in Dr. Johnson's
time.

Sir, let us take a walk down Union-street,
and see what it is like to-day. This Union-street
is one of the streets of the world. For the
solidity, regularity, and beauty of its buildings, it
has no equal, even in Paris. The roadway and
pavements, formed of the same grey granite of
which the houses are built, are singularly clean,
and the whole street for the length of a mile
looks as if it had been cut and fashioned out of
a long ridge of solid rock. From one end of the
street to the other there is not a brick nor a
single patch of stucco to be seen. All is solid
granite, put together so nicely that even the
mortar is invisible. The shops are splendid,
most of them having large plate-glass windows in
which all kinds of rich goods are displayed with
much taste. The fruiterers' shops are particu-
larly attractive, and the show of fruit in some of
them is not inferior to that of the middle row in
Covent Garden, London. The public buildings
constructed of granite, and in the purest Grecian
style of architecture, have a most noble appearance.
There is financial stability in their very look.
No one could have any apprehension of such
banks as those breaking. The market opposite
the post-office is an immense building. The lower
part is devoted to fish; the upper part to fruit
and vegetables; the side-passages to butchers'
meat, poultry, game, &c., and the galleries to fancy
wares of all kinds. In fact, the Aberdeen market
combines Covent Garden, Billingsgate, Newgate,
and Leadenhall markets, and the Lowther
Arcade, all in one. It is a most commodious
and well-contrived structure, and the Duke of
Bedford might do well to run down and take a
look at it before he decides upon the plan for a