178 FRESH FIELDS 



ing time; a fertile queen indeed, and plenty of 

 brood-comb! Were it not for the wildernesses of 

 America, of Africa, and Australia, to which these 

 swarms migrate, 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 coun- 

 try village has its closes, its streets between streets, 

 where the humbler portion of the population is 

 packed aAvay. This back-door humanity streams 

 forth to all parts of the world, and carries the na- 

 tional virtues with it. In Avalking through some of 

 the older portions of Edinburgh, 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 occupied, the tenements crowd- 

 ing and lapping over each other, the interstices 

 filled, every coign of vantage seized upon, the pend- 

 ent beds and procreant cradles ranked one above 

 another, and showing all manner of quaint and in- 

 genious forms and adaptability to circumstances. 

 In both London and Edinburgh there are streets 

 above streets, or huge viaducts that carry one tor- 

 rent of humanity above another torrent. They 

 utilize the hills and depressions to make more sur- 

 face 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 



