when there was a hard frost, it was the pleasure of the entire town, young and old, to go mad, and take to hurling themselves down the frozen slopes, 'keepin' the puddin' het' in an astonishing way. As were the saturnalia to old, and the Carnival to present 'Rome, so was this short insanity to the staid town— its consummation being the Hurley-hacket, a sort of express train, headed by one or two first-raters, 'perfect deevils,' who could descend the steep standing, like Hamlet in 'To be or not to be,' calm, and with their arms crossed, and their feet close heel-andtoe, shod with iron; one fellow-he was afterwards hanged-was generally the leader, straight as an arrow shooting the rapids, and yielding, like a consummate rider, to the perilous ups and downs; behind him came the lads and lasses, scudding on their hunkers; then their elders on their creepies, turned upside down, and then the ruck. Away it swept, yelling and swaying to-and-fro, like a huge dragon, lithe and supple-swingeing the horror' of its multitudinous tail-down across the street, heedless of everything, running, it may be, right into Mr. Pairman's shop, or down on the other side into William Johnstone's byre, and past the tail of his utmost coo. Then the confusion and scrimmage, and doubling of everybody up at the ending! that was the glory, like emptying an express train into a 'free toom.' All this is gone, the Cross Knowe is levelled, the Hurley hacket is unknown, no longer flames down the steep with half the town, and it may be the minister and the dominie secretly at its tail, with a fragment of a tar barrel flourishing and blazing at its head. It was worthy of the pen of him who sang of Anster Fair. The old Biggar callants may say, with their native poet Robert Rae— 'Syne fancy leads me back to some Tremendous Hurley-hacket row, When "Roarin' Billie," langsyne dumb, Gaed thunderin' doon the auld Corse Knowe.' 'London's big, but Biggar's Biggar.'-Joke of the District. THE ENTERKIN. F you have a holiday, and can trust your aneroid you can do twenty-one miles in seven hours, and wish, moreover, to see what you never saw before, and what you will never forget then take six brown biscuits in your pocket, and a return ticket to Abington, on the Caledonian, starting at 6.20 A.M. There is not much from Edinburgh to Abington that everybody does not know; but as you pass Kirknewton you I will not be the worse of remembering that the beautiful little wooded glen-'dingle or bushy dell or bosky bourne 'on the left, into whose recesses you get a brief, surreptitious glimpse, with the young Gogar trotting cheerily through it, is the once famous 'PROCUL NEGOTIIS' of the great philosophic physician Dr. Cullen, where it was his delight to walk, and muse, and delve. You may see the maze of his walks still. It was part of his little estate of Ormiston Hill. Behind the present handsome and sensible mansion the old house may still be seen, with its magnificent outlook across the Vale of the |