196 BRITISH FERTILITY. 



of Africa, and Australia, to which these swarms mi- 

 grate, the people would suffocate and trample each 

 other out. A Scotch or English city, compared with 

 one of ours, is a kind of duplex or compound city ; 

 it has a double interior, the interior of the closes 

 and alleys, in which and out of which the people 

 swarm like flies. Every country village has its 

 closes, its streets between streets, where the humbler 

 portion of the population is packed away. This 

 back-door humanity streams forth to all parts of the 

 world, and carries the national virtues with it. In 

 walking through some of the older portions of Edin- 

 burgh, I was somehow reminded of colonies of cliff- 

 swallows I had seen at home, packed beneath the 

 eaves of a farmer's barn, every inch of space occu- 

 pied, the tenements crowding and lapping over each 

 other, the interstices filled, every coigne of vantage 

 seized upon, the pendent beds and procreant cradles 

 ranked one above another, and showing all manner 

 of quaint and ingenious forms and adaptability to 

 circumstances. In both London and Edinburgh there 

 are streets above streets, or huge viaducts that carry 

 one torrent of humanity above another torrent. They 

 utilize the hills and depressions to make more surface 

 room for their swarming myriads. 



One day, in my walk through the Trosachs in the 

 Highlands, I came upon a couple of ant-hills that 

 arrested my attention. They were a type of the 

 country. They were not large, scarcely larger than 

 a peck measure, but never before had I seen arit-hills 



