Bonnie Scotland

have been a Roman station on the Tay, probably at the confluence of the Almond; and curious antiquarians have found cause for confessing to Pontius Pilate as perhaps born in the county, a reproach so

yside was the seat of the Alpine kingdom that succeeded a Pictish power. Now sunk in relative importance, Perth makes the central knot of Scottish railway travelling; so on the Eve of St. Grouse i

HE SLOPES OF

s low site depended for drainage on the floods of the Tay flushing its cellars and cesspools. But its own ci

habitants seeking distraction from their triste life. These be ignorant calumnies. At least our northern York is a typical Scottish town, well displaying the strata of its development. In quite recent years it has been much transmogrified by a new thoroughfare, fittingly named Scott Street, which, running from near the station right through the city, has altered its centre of gravity. The old High Street and South Street, with their "vennels" and "closes," lead transversely from Scott Street to the river, cut at the other end by George Street and Jo

Gaol occupies the site of Gowrie House, where James VI. had his mysterious or mythical escape from treason. The Parliament House, too, has vanished, its memory preserved by the name of a "close," the Scottish equivalent for alley. The citizens have lately adopted a traditional "Fair Maid's" house as their official lion, to which indicators point the way from all over the city. This, whatever the

n from the captivity in which he spent his boyhood, tried to bring some degree of order among the lawless feuds of his barons, using against them indeed high-handed and crooked means that were the statecraft of the age. Thus he roused fell enemies who were able to take him unawares, though the story goes that, like Alexander and C?sar, he had warning from an uncredited seer. Betrayed by false courtiers, he was retiring to bed when the monastery rang with the tramp and cries of the fierce Highlandmen seeking his blood. While the queen and her ladies tried to defend the door, Catherine Dougl

o then insisted on knighting the Lord Provost of the city, a worthy grocer, much to his discontent, and, if all tales be true, to his loss in business. Perth, as becomes the ex-capital, has a Lord Provost, who cannot meet the Lord Provost of Glasgow without raising sore points of precedence. Invested with special powers when Perth was a royal residence, its magistrates were not persons to be trifled with, as an English officer found early in the eighteenth century. This mettlesome spark, quartered here, had fa

Marshall whom it commemorates, rears its dome above a Museum of Antiquities such as becomes an ancient ci

ER OF LOCH KAT

the end of High Street, the City Buildings with windows illustrating Perth's history. Perth has now two bridges and everything handsome about it-besides the Dundee railway bridge with its footway from

dge End. That amateur of beauty, for his part, has nothing but good to say of Perth: he remembers with pleasure the precipices of Kinnoul, the swirling pools of the "Goddess-river," even the humble "Lead," in which other less gifted children have found "a treasure of flowing diamond," now covered up to belie his vision of its defilement; and his lifelong impression was that "Scottish sheaves are more golden than are bound in other lands, and that no harvests elsewhere visible to human eyes are so like the 'corn of heaven' as those of Strath Tay and Strath-Earn." Yet youthful gladness turned to pain, when through his connection with Perth Ruskin came to make that ill

had the unappreciated privilege of seeing him at work. What struck a little Philistine like me was how the painter paid no attention to a call to lunch, working away in such a furor of industry as I could sympathise with only if mischief were in question. Someone brought him a plate of soup and a glass of wine, which he hastily swallowed on his knees, and again flung himself into his absorbing task. My internal reflection was that in thus despising his meals this man showed such sense as Macfarlane's geese who, as Scott records, loved their play better than their meat. But a quite different behaviour on another occasion excited stronger disapproval of the future P.R.A. in my schoolboy mind. When out shooting with my father one hot day, I took him to a little moorland farm where the people would offer us a glass of milk. Millai

uggesting the scenes of a tamed German "Wald." At the farther side one comes out on the edge of a grand crag, the view from which has been compared to the Rhine valley, and to carry out this similitude, a mock ruin crowns the adjacent cliff. We have here turned our backs on the Grampians so finely seen from the Perth slope of the hill,

s setting

lls melting

nd the blac

tly heard

ar as covering one of those districts of a Scottish county that bear enduring by-names, like the Devonshire

NACHAR,

many southern villages. The course of the Tay from Perth to Dundee, below Kinnoul, ceases to be romantic while remaining beautiful in a more sedate and stately fashion as it flows between its r

smile and whi

d tear were

kes the Perth local anthem; but they all tell the same o

s syne gave

nto Mass-J

to our hea

he Lass

lose below the station, is the less extensive, once the grounds of a great Carthusian monastery, then site of a strong fort built by Cromwell, now notable mainly for the avenue through which the road from Edinburgh comes in over it, and for the wharf at its side that forms a port for small vessels and excursion steamers plying by leave of the tide. On the landward side, beyond the station, Perth is spreading itself up the broomy slopes of

nel Islands, when wicked wit declared its maker to have a contract for sweeping out the Dundee theatre. Northern undergraduates at Oxford and Cambridge are believed to have spread to southern breakfasts the use of this confection in the form so well known now that its materials are so cheap. The name has a Gree

e citizens, who on the safe riverside have the spectacle of pleasure boating against the difficulties of a strong stream and shallow rapids, and of the pulling of salmon nets in the season. Here a barelegged laddie, with the rudest tackle, has been known to hook a 30-lb. fish, holding on to the monster for two hours till some men helped him out with his fortune. The salmon of the Tay, reared in the Stormontfield Ponds above Perth, are famous for size, a weight of over 70 lbs. being not unknown; and cavillers on other streams cannot belittle its bigger fish by the sneer of "bigger liars there!" The keeping of fish in ice, and railway communications, have much enhanced the price, to the astonishment of a Highland laird who in a London tavern

in of our pronouncing as Marchbanks what we spelt as Cholmondeley. But one notes how in Scotland as in England, the tendency is to restore such words to their full sound, as in this case. Near the station in Perth is Pomarium Street, marking the orchard of the old Carthusian monastery, or, as some have held, the outskirt of the Roman

R DALMALLY,

take a distinguished example, was Balfoúr, till the trick of southern speech shifted back the accent. Forbes is still vernacularly a dissyllable in the Forbes country, as in Marmion, and in the old schoolboy saw about General 4 B's, who marched his 4 C's, etc. Dalziels and Menzies must have long given up in despair the attempt to get their names properly pronounced in the south as Déél and Meengus. The family known at home as Jimmyson become now content to have made a noise in the world as Jameson. But some such changes have been long in progress. It was "bloody Mackengie" whom audacious boys dared to come out of his grave in Greyfriars

le addled by the sun, have often been led to read odd meanings into revelations and prophecies, studied late in life. There used to be a detachment of retired veterans encamped about Perth as headquarters of their Bethel, whose wives and children, in some cases, attended the Episcopal Chapel. A peculiarity of their belief was an absolute horror of being present at any alien worship, even family prayers, as I could show from some striking instances. This must have borne hard on soldier converts, who, in the army, are allowed a choice of only three forms of worship. "No fancy religions in the service," growled the sergeant to a recruit who professed himself a Seventh Day Baptist: "fall in with the Roman Catholics!" Another note of the Sandemanians was an unwillingness to communicate their views, what even seemed a resentfulness of inquiry by outsiders. Disraeli excused a similar trait in the Jews by the dry remark, "The House of Lords does not

ng the elevated bank of the river, above the sward that makes the town bathing-place, and brown pools that Ruskin might have found perilous as well as picturesque, but as he speaks of himself as keeping company with his girl cousin, not to speak of the fear of his careful m

and Abbey of Scone; the Stone of Destiny, that ancient palladium, fabled pillow of Jacob's vision of the angels, on which the Scottish kings were crowned, has been in Westminster Abbey since Edward I.'s invasion. The modern mansion contains some relics of Queen Mary and her son, but its owne

n Hill for what is believed to have been the site of Macbeth's Castle, and for a fine prospect

ME NEAR DALMAL

, it is time that some serious attempt were made to whitewash their characters, as Renan has done for Jezebel, and Froude for Henry VIII. No doubt these two worthies represented the good old Scottish party, strong on Disruption principles and sternly set against the Anglican influences introduced through Malcolm Canmore, in favour of whose family the southern poet shows a natural bias. Did we know the whole truth, that gracious Duncan may have had a scheme to serve the Macbeths as the Macdonalds of Glencoe were served by their guests. The on

solitary farmhouses, picturesque old mills, streamlets, pools, and all those quiet, secret, unexpected, yet strangely-familiar features of English scenery that Tennyson shows us in his idylls and eclogues." Every inch of tillable land is in the north more economically dealt with; the farmer, struggling against a harsher climate, cannot afford to leave shady hedges and winding paths; his fields are fenced by uncompromising

nae poet e

el' he learn

trotting bu

think

tamed Highland stream winds sinuously to the Tay between its craggy rim and the rounded ridge of the Ochils. The village has a well-built air, due to the neighbourhood of Pitkaithly spa, that in Scott's day was a local St. Ronan's, whose patrons lodged at the Bridge of Earn, or even walked out from Perth, to take the waters, which before breakfast, on the top of this exercise, must have had a notable effect in certain cases. The original Spa in Belgium owed much of its credit to the fact of its s

a way, I have seen a pack of foxhounds, whereas, in the ruggeder

and law the

e slip or b

ed where, ho

us fox is tra

er seat of Pictish princes, not far away, was at Forteviot, near the Kinnoul Earls' Dupplin Castle, where Edward Balliol defeated the Regent Mar in a hot fight, before marching on to Perth to be crowned for a time, when Scotland, like Brentford, had two kings. If only for their natural amenities, these spots might well be visited; yet to tourists they are unknown unless as way-stati