I see that certain critics accuse me of being flippant, discursive, garrulous, gossiping, everything that your gravely plodding writers are not, and they no doubt find readers to their mind. It must be confessed that as a model of style I have an eye rather on the upper waters of the Tay, with its swirls and eddies and ripples, than on its broad and placid flow by the fat Carse of Gowrie. All I can say for myself is that I keep my course amid windings and tumblings, and that my foaming shallows may sweep along the same silt as loads drumlier currents lower down. Yet one loves to please all tastes, within reason, so for once let me try to be as steady and slow as the mill-lead at Perth, which, if all traditions be true, began as a Roman aqueduct, and so may give itself airs of classical authority.

The Tay, then, is the principal river of Scotland, which discharges into the North Sea a larger volume of water than any other in Britain. Its head-streams rise upon the borders of Argyll, but only after issuing from Loch Tay does it assume a name apparently derived from a Celtic word for quiet-flowing water, in other parts of the kingdom taking such forms as Taw and Tavy. The Tay has its course of 120 miles almost entirely in Perthshire, receiving many tributaries from the mountains on either side, and thus draining a basin of some 2400 square miles. At Perth it becomes navigable for small vessels, and debouches at the thriving port of Dundee, where its estuary separates the shires of Forfar and Fife. For further details, see any geographical work.

There now! no Aristarchus can find fault with that paragraph, in which I have not broken into a single anecdote or metaphor, though tempted to say en passant that the basin of the Tay only needs flattening out to over-measure that of the Thames. But this formal style sits on me as uneasily as Saul’s armour upon David, so I leave it to rust in the works of reference; and as a stone for my scrip, snatch up a well-worn quotation already slung by a mightier hand:

Scots are not in the way of belittling their own advantages; but a certain Italian writer gravely comments on this statement by giving an estimate as to the depth of the Tiber at Rome, whereas he himself has seen a bare-legged boy wading the Tay above Perth bridge to pick up pebbles. Being unable to refute his main contention, I would have him know that this laddie was probably risking wet breeks at low tide, not in search of pebbles, but of pearls, sometimes picked up here; that a bridge would naturally be built near a ford; and that a mile higher up, beyond the tide-flow, the Tay is deep enough to drown boys in its treacherous pools, and might make Julius Caesar himself call for help if he tried swimming across it in spate. If classic poets are to be trusted, yellow is the best epithet of the Tiber, while Ruskin admiringly tells us how the pools of the Tay glint brown and blue among black swirls and rippling shallows. In the matter of climate, at all events, we are not going to let any foreigner over-brag us, for as the local poet, Alexander Glas, exclaims beside the Tay:

This bard, perhaps, was not aware that the snow lies longer on Soracte than on Kinnoull Hill; nor does he confess that for two or three months in the year the happy Caledonian swain may now and then welcome Italian ice-cream merchants; and in fair prose he ought to own his ocean breezes for east winds on this side of the country. The city of Perth, indeed, stands hardly a score of miles back from the sea, and made a thriving port in days when it was an advantage to unload goods up-country, well out of the way of attack. Its mariners carried on not only a coasting trade, but sailed to the Hanse ports, and took a turn at fighting with their English rivals when competition would sometimes be pushed to the point of piracy. It appears that trading craft plied as far up as Scone, below which a row-boat is now apt to stick in shallow rapids.

Through the international war-time flourished at Perth a notable line of Mercers, who appear as wealthy traders, magistrates, and benefactors of their native city, sometimes rising to higher posts in the state, coming to make noble alliances through which their head branch is now engrafted in the Lansdowne title. The old staple trade of the Fair City was glove-making; its skinners became an important corporation, and tanning held out to our day, but has been overlaid by dyeing, trades that might all merge into each other. Perhaps as a branch of dyeing sprang Todd’s Perth Office Ink, which I note to be now glorified as Moncrieff’s Ink, and long may it flow under that auspicious name! Another industry of Perth used to be shipbuilding, where, up to the end of the eighteenth century, vessels came and went by the hundred, and a smack sailed for London every few days. Perth was in the way of improving her port and deepening its approaches, when railways brought about a permanent low tide in the Tay traffic.

While ships were growing larger, the Tay estuary had been silting up and narrowing as its flat shores were reclaimed into the fertile Carse of Gowrie. This dry ground was won by inches, a name often met along Tayside, where what were once islands have become welded on to the shore. The Inches, par excellence, are the public parks above and below Perth; the Inch being its North Inch, in which the Romans are fondly believed to have hailed their Campus Martius—Parvam Trojam, simulataque magnis Pergama.

Higher up the river, in its great bend to the south, another flat bears the suggestive name of “Bloody Inches”; and the Perth Inches too have been arena for many a fray. The chief martial memory of the South Inch is as site of Cromwell’s citadel, in the construction of which were used the walls of the Greyfriars, with hundreds of its tombstones, besides other monuments of the city. The North Inch is best known to fame for the battle of the Clans in 1396, when threescore Highlandmen let out most of their quarrelsome blood before an excited multitude, the king and court looking on from what served as a grand stand, the Gilten Arbour in the Dominican Gardens, a structure that probably stood near the present site of the Perth Academy in Rose Terrace.

There can be no doubt about the authenticity of this battle; a record is extant of making the lists for it, the number of combatants being expressly stated as sixty. But, among the pregnant confusion of Highland names, it is not easy to be sure who those champions were. We used to be taught from Tales of a Grandfather that they represented hostile confederacies called the Clan Kay and the Clan Chattan, the latter perhaps wild cats of the mountains, the former by no means to be identified with the Mackays of the north. But the Kay and the Chattan names appear to cover one another, while the other party seems better distinguished as the Clan Quhele, in whom some see the Camerons and a hint of Lochiel, others the Macdougals, their name thus transformed by a tour de force of etymology, while also it has been conjectured that this mysterious clan did not survive its defeat, scattered and absorbed into luckier kindreds.

A writer, wearing both the names of Shaw and Macintosh, who has given piously profound study to

the subject, concludes that those adversaries were the sons of an Adam and a Dougal, clans known to have fought against each other in the wars of Bruce, which as likely as not means an old tribal feud. Adam, it seems, in this wet climate, is quite capable of being weathered down into Ay, Hay, or Kay. The name Dougal sounds in Gaelic something like Gooil, or Hooil, which Lowland writers might make a shot at as Quhele, Quhevil, Queill, Chewill, and other forms in which it appears. Their rivals in certain books are called Clachinyha, which Dr. R. C. Maclagan claims as the origin of his own name, and to illustrate the contention, presents some forty spellings of Maclagan varied through four centuries, also nearly a dozen used by the same family in the records of one generation. Not only at home, indeed, are Scottish names apt to be transmogrified. Belize, in Honduras, is said to be a corruption of Wallace, the pirate, not the patriot; and there is a story that a Macdougal, shipwrecked of old on the Barbary coast, so much impressed himself on the natives as a santon that his tomb stood mumbling godfather to the port of Mogador.

In Wyntoun’s Chronicle, the leaders’ names are anglicised as “Christy Johnson” (Gilchrist MacIan) and “Sir Farquhar’s son,” the latter elsewhere called Little Schea or Shaw. The Shaws hold themselves a branch of the Mackintoshes, who claim the headship of Clan Chattan, also claimed by the MacPhersons, “sons of a parson,” or at least of some one boasted by a certain bard as a “superior person.” The matter seems to have begun with an encounter in which the Sheriff of Angus was killed—a long way from the Cameron country—in quelling such a disturbance as often vexed the Highland line. The king sent the Earls of Dunbar and Crawford to do what justice could be done upon this outrage; and they have the credit of suggesting the settlement of an obstinate feud by picked bloodshed in the royal presence. Some writers have wasted ink on the feebleness of Robert III. as to blame for what strikes them as a revolting scene; but such a show of gladiatorship was as much in keeping with the manners of the age as a football match with ours; and to the king’s advisers it no doubt seemed excellent policy to let those wild cats cripple or punish each other in a holiday spectacle. As a matter of fact it is recorded that the border had peace from the caterans for long after this signal blood-letting. “The forwardest of both parties being slain,” says George Buchanan, “the promiscuous multitude, left without leaders, gave over their trade of sedition for many years after, and betook themselves to their husbandry again.”

The early historians differ as to details. Eachin MacIan, the young chief who loses heart, owes a good deal to Scott’s dramatic instinct; but Goethe was not well posted in the facts, when to Eckermann he extolled the novelist’s “art” in “contriving” to make one man fail on the day of combat that his place may be taken by the hero, Smith: “there is finish! there is a hand!” One story makes the fugitive escape by swimming before the fight. Several mention a man as missing from the Clan Quhele ranks, to fill whose place a sturdy Perth craftsman volunteered on promise of reward. More than one Perthshire family has been proud to claim descent from this bandy-legged champion. If it be true, as somewhere stated, that his posterity, the Gows, were recognised as a shoot of Clan Chattan, it may be that Harry Smith was the real Conachar, apprenticed at Perth to a trade which Highland chiefs might well see cause to patronise. Scott, however, seems romancing in putting the combatants into shirts of mail. All the accounts agree as to two bands of next to naked Highlandmen hacking and hewing each other with swords, axes, and dirks, till of one side only ten or eleven were left sorely wounded, and of the other, one escaped or was taken prisoner, his fate being variously stated as pardon and hanging. No doubt the show furnished as much satisfaction to its public as when, sixty years ago, the German traveller, J. G. Kohl, found the Inch again covered with people eager to see a circus clown give bold advertisement to his company by crossing the Tay in a washing-tub drawn by four geese. It has been supposed, by the way, that the combat of Highlanders may have been arranged partly for the amusement of a body of French knights then visiting the Scottish court, and no doubt finding it dull as well as rude.

Since that slaughterous day, some real fights and many sham ones have been enacted on the Inch of Perth. Of one I may say, pars magna fui, and though my militation was without glory it did not want an accursed bard who, in the columns of the Perthshire Constitutional, sang, a long way after Tennyson, how “some one had blundered.” These were the early days of the Volunteer movement, inspired by more zeal than knowledge, when, in my teens, I served as sole officer to a company of the Perthshire Volunteers, after some slight apprenticeship in a school cadet corps, equipped with discarded carbines. One of my first appearances in efficient arms was at the head of a column that marched on to the lower end of the Inch before more spectators than would be gathered about the arena of that clan-combat. The foe here coming into view, it behoved my company to extend in skirmishing order, covering the deployment of our column into line. So much I could do; and we found ourselves exposed in the van facing a hostile line of Dundee Highlanders who held the centre of the Inch. But the report of what then befell is so little to our credit that I throw it into shamefaced small print.

Another disgrace had nearly stained my company’s name, when we served as guard of honour for Queen Victoria, on the inauguration of Prince Albert’s statue at the foot of the North Inch. For once Her Majesty came late—I forget through what delay—and we had to stand expectant for hours under a hot sun, kept on the alert by a constant passing of dignitaries, and pressed upon by a crowd that tried to break through our ranks as often as a stately equipage drove up to excite the cry, “That’s her, that’s her!” In vain I demanded the experienced help of police; on us raw warriors fell the whole work of keeping the way clear, a very fidgety task for a short-sighted young officer, who had not seen his sovereign since he was young enough to be disappointed that she wore a straw bonnet instead of a golden crown. When at last she came, it was without observation, the crowd having given her up; then I shall always be thankful that my lucky star showed me a carriage filled with ladies in black, to which I was able to present arms just in the nick of time—a moment more and the Queen would have been let go by in silence without any salutation even from her heedless guard!

And already I had made a blunder of etiquette. A considerable force of regulars were present, while we, as a local body, held the place of honour. During the hours of uncertainty officers of rank kept galloping to and fro, to whom I was uncertain whether or no I should pay military compliments. I asked my colonel, who was as much at a loss as myself. Then I consulted the staff-sergeant on whom I depended as my coach, and his advice struck me as full of wisdom: “I don’t know what the practice is, sir, but it would be safer to do it too much than too little.” So I began presenting arms to every cocked hat that came by, and as I could never be quite sure whether this or that one had been already saluted, our rifles were going up and down all morning like the keys of a piano. Afterwards I learned that the Sovereign’s guard should ignore any other personage.

I could tell other tales of the Perthshire Volunteers in their early days, but all I will say here is that if the Territorials who have taken our place are more smart and efficient, they cannot surpass us in good-will to serve our country. Some of us can remember an older and perhaps less serviceable force, the tottering Pensioners who turned out at least once a year upon the Inch to fire a feu de joie for the Queen’s birthday. I rather think I knew that Peninsular lieutenant of whom Sir Evelyn Wood tells a touching tale—though here I am a little confused between two bearded veterans that gave kindly words to a boy—how he had lived obscurely at Perth, unnoted by two generations, till Major Wood took a public occasion of pointing him out to his fellow-citizens as one of the heroes of Albuera; then the old man in a back seat bowed his head in tears of pride and joy—“Let me greet!”—overcome to hear that fiery day not forgotten by soldiers of another age. To a veteran of a former generation quartered at Perth was born a son, afterwards well-known as Charles Mackay, editor and poet, and as stepfather of one of the most popular novelists of our day, whose modestly retiring disposition is so notorious that I do not mention her name.

In my youth the neighbourhood of Perth was strongly garrisoned by retired officers, some of whom belonged to the Sandemanian congregation here, an exclusive body that, like the Plymouth Brethren in England, had a curious attraction for old Indian soldiers. The sons usually went with their fathers, while in some cases the mothers and daughters attended the Episcopal “Chapel,” where my Wenigkeit, as son of an Englishwoman, escaped the long sermons and Shorter Catechism of Presbyterian boyhood. The Anglican form of worship has in the last generation made great way among townsmen, but it then was apt to mark either English associations or hereditary Toryism. Perth had a Cathedral, looked on askance in those days as “Puseyite,” so that even the bishop for a time held aloof from it; at all events he preached regularly in our smaller church, his lawn sleeves attracting youthful reverence beside the black-gowned pastor of those Protestant days. Now, so strongly has turned the tide of ecclesiastical fashion, it is the Cathedral at whose door a string of equipages may be seen standing of a Sunday morning, and three or four English prelates officiating at the altar in the shooting season. But half a century ago, and later, the “Chapel,” as we called it, as yet ignorant that we were “the Church in Scotland,” made the more genteel place of worship, with peers, baronets, and lairds as thick as blackberries in the congregation, their carriages breaking the Sabbath quiet of the street. The English soldiers were marched to it from the other end of the town, though that empty Cathedral stood neighbour to their barracks; and thereby hangs a tale to be caught at in my reminiscent mood.

One warm summer forenoon, some of the congregation may have been finding the sermon too long, when it was broken on by a stirring incident. A whispered message came to the officer of the military party. The men abruptly rose to clatter out, heedless of the pulpit. Presently the captain sent back for his sword, and his wife turned pale before the surmising eyes of the congregation. What could be the matter? Had the French landed? Neither preacher nor people could give all their minds to the conclusion of the service. As we streamed forth, all agog with curiosity, the street showed the unusual Sabbath sight of cabs full of policemen dashing up towards what was then the General Prison for Scotland, beyond the South Inch. Report soon spread that the inmates of this Penitentiary, hundreds strong, had broken out and might be expected to scatter over the country like ravening wolves, after an alarming

example familiar to me from the pages of—was it not?—Midshipman Easy.

The excitement that followed seemed a godsend to youngsters, and perhaps to older captives of the dull Sabbath. But, as usual, rumour exaggerated. There had been a conspiracy to break prison, which, in the case of the men, proved a fiasco; while the women, after throwing their Bibles at the chaplain as signal of revolt, got loose into a yard, but failed either to make their escape from the walls or to release the men, as had been plotted. These incidents I state with reserve, after the example of the Father of History in dealing with facts beyond his own observation. The story that passed current was that our gallant centurion reached the scene of action in hot haste, but on beholding the enemy he marched off in high dudgeon, flatly refusing to lead his company against a mob of women. In the end, we understood, those Bacchanals were quelled by the artillery of the Fire Brigade.

If all tales be true, this is not the most ignominious retreat forced upon our gallant soldiers at the hands of Scotswomen. In Penny’s Traditions of Perth it is told how, in the old martinet days, half a dozen soldiers were flogged in public on the North Inch. Mobs of that century seem rather to have enjoyed such spectacles, as a rule; but pressed enlistments had made military discipline a sore point in Scotland; and now the poor fellows’ cries excited angry pity among the lookers-on. When it came to the turn of a married man, sentenced to five hundred lashes for stealing a few potatoes to feed his family, their feelings boiled over. His own wife was present, who, as he screamed under the lash, rushed in to hold the drummer’s arm; then other women began to pelt the executioners with stones. Led by these pitying Amazons, the crowd broke through the ranks to rescue the sufferer, and his fellow-soldiers apparently made no stout resistance. The officers were set to flight, the unfortunate adjutant being captured, whom the women are said to have stripped and whipped on the spot as a lesson in humanity. That made the last flogging on the North Inch.

Perth has had the soldiers of many armies quartered upon it, including Cromwell’s troopers, and the Hessians encamped for long on the Inch after the Rebellion of ’45. At that time barracks were so deficient that Cumberland’s men had to be lodged in the parish church and meetinghouses, turned into dormitories by deal boards laid across the pews. Later on, soldiers would be billeted upon the townsfolk, as the militiamen were in my recollection; and their pay was so poor that, like that culprit already mentioned, they did not always prove honest guests. Gowrie House, presented by the loyal townsfolk to the victor of Culloden, was made into an Artillery Barrack, but afterwards given back to the town to serve as its jail and county buildings in exchange for ground above the South Inch, where the General Prison came to be built. This was originally a depÔt for French prisoners of war, the first batch of whom, confined in a church on their way from Dundee, stole all the brass nails, green baize, and other fittings they could lay hands on. The prisoners became increased to thousands, who on the whole must have behaved better, for they are said to have been missed at the peace, having, indeed, spent in the city a good deal of money which they earned in part by ingenious industries. These foreigners appear as the unexpected means of importing cricket into Scotland, first played on the Inches of Perth by the English regiments sent to guard the depÔt.

English soldiers, one supposes, are not now needed to guard Perth, its ordinary garrison a small body of the Black Watch or other local regiment. Gone, too, are the militia whom I once came upon drawn up at the top of the “Whins” without a stitch of uniform on, stripped to bathe by word of command. Military displays on the Inch will be less common than games of golf, cricket, and football, the last in its more unsophisticated forms, since this public space does not lend itself to the collection of gate-money; but the barefoot laddies who here kick about the “leather” for their own divert, are the buds of those professionals that bloom out to such applause in English enclosures. And the rules of football have changed even since my youth, when a band of youngsters from various public schools, gathered on the Inch for a Christmas game, found themselves all at loggerheads in an anarchy not yet divided into the kingdoms of “Rugger” and “Soccer.” Still more has the game been refined since a day when country folk coming down to market, about two miles out of Perth, met a man charging along the Crieff road, chased by a party of the Forty-Second with their kilts streaming in the wind; at first sight the fugitive was taken for a deserter, and the farmers drew aside to give him a fair chance, but it was only a Methven lad carrying off the ball from a match on the North Inch, nor could he be tackled till it was goaled in his house, half a dozen miles from the field. Scone had once a name for rough matches, at which limbs were often broken, but, as the proverb went, “A’s fair at the ba’ of Scone.”

The example of that hero warns me not to linger on the Perth Inch, but to be off up the Tay, keeping as near it as one can for parks, and for the jealously guarded banks of valuable salmon fisheries. For the first two miles there is a public walk up the right bank to the Almond mouth. On the opposite side, hidden in lordly foliage, lies Scone Palace and the site of the old Pictish capital. The Scot is so notoriously modest that English example has often led him to mishandle his own names: before Scone gets corrupted, then, let me insist that it is pronounced Scoon, as the eatable scone, so mumbled in Cockney mouths, should rhyme with on, and not be treated as their own.

To modern Scone we could come on that side by a tramway which is turning this goodly village into a suburb of Perth. Even when we get into the Highlands we shall find how the squalid “Tullyveolans” and “Glenburnies” have been improved away generations ago. At the gates of great proprietors, at all events, a Scottish village usually compares well with an English one in point of comfort if not of picturesqueness. The former commonly wears an air of stiff neatness and coldness toned by its grey stone walls and slated roofs; the hand of the laird and factor is seen over it all, and only here and there are left such wigwam makeshifts as might still move Waverley’s disgust in the poverty-stricken Hebrides. The Southern village, even if a model one, is apt to be more taking to the eye, with its show of warm brick scattered among the green, its unstudied variety of thatched and lichened roofs, of gabled, plastered, and half-timbered walls, where paddocks and gardens divide an age-mellowed block of farm buildings from a row of picturesquely decayed hovels; and over all rises the tower or spire of some much-patched church, neighboured by a smug chapel that throws the ancient fane into striking relief. The churches of Scotland make no such points of dignity, as a rule; but their old austerity now often becomes relaxed by more ambitious architecture of Anglican-aping days; and here and there has been spared some stout hull that weathered the Reformation storms.

One feature of a northern parish seems past praying for. The churchyard, if not miserably neglected, is apt to look grim, dismal, forbidding, in contrast with those flowery God’s acres of a less stern faith, that sometimes tempt poor human nature to be half in love with death. As a child I remember my nurse, and she was an Englishwoman, pointing out to me for reprobation what seemed the Popish sacrilege of a wreath laid upon a grave. Such Protestant superstition has been broken down in the last half-century. Large towns, even so long ago, had more or less ornamentally laid-out cemeteries, which were allowed to be the goal of a Sabbath walk. But still, in out-of-the-way parts, the disposition is not to mantle the king of terrors in any sentimental disguise; and weeds may be more common than flowers about tombstones that give lessons of warning rather than of consolation. The memorials of the dead are oftenest plain and practical, like the homes of the living, whose very gardens run rather to kail and berries than to flowers. Yet where a Scotsman’s time is less taken up by wringing a bare subsistence from his poor soil, he can treat himself to the luxury of bloom; his grey walls are more and more lit by hardy creepers; and on heathery slopes you may see cottages covered with gay tropÆolum, which I cannot coax to flourish on a London balcony.

But Scone, in its semi-urbanity, is no fair specimen of a Scottish village, nor are we yet in the Highlands, though hints of them peep to view as we pass up towards the blue Grampian barrier. We soon come, indeed, to a manufacturing nook, a “white country” of Perthshire, where the river, swollen by several streams uniting as the Luncarty Burn, washes the bleach-fields of that ilk and the cotton mills of Stanley. But these meads of Luncarty were once dyed red rather than white, when the Danes had almost overcome a Scottish king, till a peasant named Hay, with his two sons, held a narrow pass so well with his ploughshare that the Vikings in turn were put to flight by those rustic champions, claimed as ancestors for the House of Errol. Be this a fable or no, when the bleach-field came to be laid out, several tumuli were opened containing skeletons and weapons.

The whole country on both sides of the river is studded with Druidical stones, with camps and gravemounds, and with sites of old tradition, such as that ascribed to Macbeth’s castle, where the Sidlaw Hills swell up behind the left bank of the Tay, winding round them under the wooded cliffs of Kinnoull, making such a bend that a house I have reason to know stands equidistant between two reaches, which are nearly a score of miles apart by the bank. Should I be spared another score of years or so, I could tell some queer tales about more than one late laird in this nook, whose memory at present must rest in the truce de mortuis. As for Macbeth’s memory, I have already shown some hint of materials for whitewashing it. Why was not Shakespeare told of this Thane being an elder in the Wee Free Church, when King Duncan must needs send his loons south, one to Oxford and one to Cambridge, who came back dropping their h’s, whustling on the Sabbath, and such-like; then what for no should an outraged patriot but yoke with the sword of Gideon on the whole Erastian hypothec? As for Lady Macbeth, does not Shakespeare himself admit evidence to justify a soft-hearted verdict of temporary insanity?

Above the mills of Stanley we come to Campsie Linn, the first romantic scene of the Tay, on which is set the last tableau in The Fair Maid of Perth. Such a picturesque nook tempted the monks of Cupar to build a retreat on the precipitous rock above its cataract; and here was the country seat of the Mercers, that mediÆval trading family of Perth, already mentioned as growing into nobility. But the great name hereabouts in the old days was the Drummonds, lords of Stobhall on the Tay, their principal residence till they built a more lordly one in Strathearn.

This family, long so powerful in Perthshire, claim to be descended from an Hungarian chief, settled in Scotland under the civilising patronage of Malcolm Canmore. So well did his line thrive here that a daughter of the house of Drummond sat to watch that North Inch combat as Robert III.’s queen, Anabella, mother of the unfortunate Duke of Rothesay, who comes to such a tragic end in Scott’s romance. A century later, when the family had moved their main seat to Drummond Castle, another connection with royalty again brought about a mysterious crime. James IV., all his life much misled by Cupid, took for his mistress or left-handed wife Bonnie Margaret Drummond; it is said that he proposed to marry her openly as soon as a dispensation from the Pope unloosed their bonds of kindred. Be that as it may, other Scottish nobles looked askance on the growth of the Drummonds, while politic statesmen may well have sought to clear the way to peace with England by the King’s marriage to Margaret Tudor; there is also a suspicion of jealousy on the part of another royal lady love. By unknown hands, Margaret Drummond and her two sisters were poisoned at Drummond Castle, and they lie beneath three slabs of blue marble in Dunblane Cathedral. A daughter of this doubtful union was married successively to the Earl of Huntly, the Duke of Albany, and to a kinsman of her own; then her infusion of Stuart blood has passed into at least a score of Scottish noble families.

The strain of royal descent was reinforced when the head of the Drummond house married a daughter of this lady by the Stuart Duke of Albany. By James VI. Lord Drummond was made Earl of Perth, a title augmented by the French dukedom of Melfort. The Perth earldom was blown out into an empty dukedom by the Pretender,

whose fortunes its holder followed into France, leaving his possessions to be confiscated, and his honours attainted. The peerage was restored to a Drummond under George III., but died out for want of heirs male; then through marriage of a daughter the property passed to Lord Gwydir of Wales, and through the Willoughby d’Eresbys to the English Earl of Ancaster. I fear to make the reader’s head ache in the labyrinth of Drummond genealogy. Enough to say that the earldom of Perth and Melfort was restored in Victoria’s reign to a Drummond who held a French title. Supported by a pension from a more fortunate kinsman, he lived latterly in seclusion at Kew, and was buried there a few years ago, his life shadowed by a painful tragedy that left his house without a direct heir to its pride and its poverty. His home was literally a cottage, a striking contrast to the glories of Drummond Castle; but to friendly neighbours, who respected his misfortunes, he could humorously boast of being by rights a duke in two countries.

A tragedy in humbler life has been commemorated in a Tayside ballad, The Weary Coble of Cargill. The hero, Davie Drummond, is described as a “brave page,” also as the “butler of Stobhall,” who, with the keys of the mansion hanging at his belt, undertook to cross the swollen Tay one night in a coble or ferry-boat: this local Leander seems to have had a Hero on each bank, and to have played the perilous part of not being off with one love before being on with another. The heroine, “the lass of Ballathie,” took strong measures in a fit of jealousy, when Davie would not stay the night on her side the river—

The poor youth was taken out a corpse; then too late came lifelong repentance to his resentful sweetheart—

Above Cargill, the river is spanned by the Caledonian railway; then on the left bank comes in the Isla leading up to Blairgowrie, behind which opens one of the great passes into the Highlands. Between Meikleour and Kinclaven Castle, taken and burned by Wallace, the Tay makes an extravagant circumvention of inches and haughs, flowing north for one reach, then turning south, as it comes round from its eastward course by Murthly. The Highland line cuts across this elbow bend to pass opposite Caputh, reached by a floating bridge that looks safer than that coble of Cargill. In Bonnie Scotland I could not but speak of the grounds of Murthly, with their show of ambitious structures; but I am not sure if I did justice to the gardens and miles of magnificent avenues, that, like those of Meikleour and Ballathie lower down, and of Dunkeld above, might call a blush to the cheek of Dr. Johnson’s ghost, if it could visit this edge of the Highlands. From near Murthly station one may walk for two and a half straight miles on a grass ride bordered by coniferous trees, bringing us down to the Dunkeld road, beyond Bankfoot, a highway which has taken care not to follow the vagaries of the river.

It is only fourteen miles to Dunkeld from Perth, whence houses on the Grampian slope may be made out on a clear day. Strangers here who would take the very shortest way for a peep at the Highlands may now from Strathord station reach Bankfoot on a light railway up the Ordie Burn, and over the native heath of Robert Nicoll, who, but for an early death and his consuming zeal for reforming politics, might have been better known as a Perthshire Burns.

Beyond Bankfoot and its annexe Waterloo, the road comes to close quarters with the mountains, where it winds up to a rugged face of woods and grouse moors, then under Rohallion joins the river and the railway in the pass of Birnam, guarded by the village city of Dunkeld. Here we leave the valley of Strathmore to enter one of the famous Highland gates, at the mouth of which a watery hollow called the Stare-dam was long a place of dread to wild mountaineers, for whom its “Hanged Men’s Trees” made such a warning as did the “kind gallows” of Crieff.

Of Dunkeld, the Highland border town, I gave account in Bonnie Scotland, so that here I will rather repeat what has been said about it by others. The Rev. Prebendary Gilpin, that original of Dr. Syntax in search of the Picturesque, who had found Arthur’s Seat “odd, misshapen and uncouth,” unpleasing from every point of view, except that the streets of London had been paved out of its quarries, this severe critic is more gracious to Dunkeld, where “the wild unshapely desert begins to separate into parts, and form itself into hills, hung with wood and broken with rock.” He can find no fault with the Tay, here “broad, deep and silent,” nor with “the grand screen of mountains” encircling it; and our generation is not much concerned with his criticism that it will take a century for the woods to grow up so as “to give a proper degree of sylvan richness to the scene.” Since then the woods have had time to clothe this fine amphitheatre, some inaccessible crag faces having been planted by the device of firing canisters filled with seeds against them from a cannon. Mr. Gilpin goes so far as to applaud Nature’s efforts in the side ravine of the Braan, though he shakes his head over the duke’s “improvements,” such as often caused so much division of opinion among those pundits of the picturesque. He agrees with our taste in condemning the “Claud Lorraine glasses” and other optical devices with which the Hermitage at the Falls of Braan was furnished, being “apt to believe that Nature has given us a better apparatus for viewing objects in a picturesque light than any the optician can furnish.” Also he shows very proper disgust on coming, among the sights of this demesne, upon a hollow in the rock with an inscription recording the names of a set of gentlemen who, on such and such a date, had drunk it full of punch.

But when from Dunkeld he takes his way on up Strath Tay, this Aristarchus almost forgets to be critical of scenes that “call aloud for the pencil.” The poet Gray, one of the earliest appreciative visitors to the Highlands, was not less admiring, though he gives a more matter-of-fact account of a “road winding through beautiful woods, with the Tay almost always in full view to the right, being here from three to four hundred feet over. The Strath-Tay, from a mile to three miles or more wide, covered with corn and spotted with groups of people then in the midst of their harvest. On either hand a vast chain of rocky mountains, that changed their face and opened something new every hundred yards, as the way turned or the cloud passed: in short, altogether it was one of the most pleasing days I have passed these many years.” Then, before leaving Atholl, he would exclaim, “Since I saw the Alps, I have seen nothing sublime till now!” And of the Highlands in general this precursor of the next century exclaims: “A fig for your poets, painters, gardeners and clergymen that have not been among them; their imagination can be made up of nothing but bowling-greens, flowering shrubs, horse-ponds, Fleet ditches, shell-grottoes and Chinese rails!”

Many a visitor of our day, weather permitting, gets here from coach or rail a general impression of “nothing but sunshine and fresh breezes, and bleating lambs, and clean tartans.” To go behind this fair scenery, set as if for the joy of poets and painters, we might turn up some burn into the rough background, and look through Ruskin’s eyes at nooks easily coloured by his “pathetic fallacy”; he knew the Highlands as not all filled by tourists, sportsmen, and prosperous sheep-farmers.

A Highland scene is, beyond dispute, pleasant enough in its own way; but, looked close at, has its shadows. Here, for instance, is the very fact of one, as pretty as I can remember—having seen many. It is a little valley of soft turf, enclosed in its narrow oval by jutting rocks and broad flakes of nodding fern. From one side of it to the other winds, serpentine, a clear brown stream, dropping into quicker ripple as it reaches the end of the oval field, and then, first islanding a purple and white rock with an amber pool, it dashes away into a narrow fall of foam under a thicket of mountain-ash and alder. The autumn sun, low, but clear, shines on the scarlet ash-berries and on the golden birch-leaves, which, fallen here and there, when the breeze has not caught them, rest quiet in the crannies of the purple rock. Beside the rock, in the hollow under the thicket, the carcass of a ewe, drowned in the last flood, lies nearly bare to the bone, its white ribs protruding through the skin, raven-torn; and the rags of its wool still flickering from the branches that first stayed it as the stream swept it down. A little lower, the current plunges, roaring, into a circular chasm like a well, surrounded on three sides by a chimney-like hollowness of polished rock, down which the foam slips in detached snowflakes. Round the edges of the pool beneath, the water circles slowly, like black oil; a little butterfly lies on its back, its wings glued to one of the eddies, its limbs feebly quivering; a fish rises and it is gone. Lower down the stream, I can just see, over a knoll, the green and damp turf roofs of four or five hovels, built at the edge of a morass, which is trodden by the cattle into a black Slough of Despond at their doors, and traversed by a few ill-set stepping-stones, with here and there a flat slab on the tops, where they have sunk out of sight; and at the turn of the brook I see a man fishing, with a boy and a dog—a picturesque and pretty group enough certainly, if they had not been there all day starving.