One of the most beautiful of Scottish rivers is the Earn, half Highland and half Lowland, winding through all the varieties of Perthshire scenery, past hoary monuments of Scotland’s struggles for birth as a nation, and among misty traditions of her saints and heroes. Yet guide-books, one observes, pass over the greater part of this strath as hurriedly as the express trains dashing across its lower end; and strangers seldom visit any but the upper reach, which enters into a regular tourist round. How such neglect is undeserved, I would fain show on an arm-chair saunter from the river’s unalluring mouth to its source in mountains of romantic fame, a distance of some forty miles as the crow flies; but a salmon has to make a much longer trip of it. Well is the Earn apostrophised by an admiring stranger, Blackwood’s first editor, Thomas Pringle, best known by his South African pictures, or by the figure he cuts in the wicked waggery of the Chaldee Manuscript.

The “drear and distant regions” are now more admired than the “margins green,” through which the Earn creeps into the Tay a few miles below Perth, where the great river broadens as an estuary about its reclaimed islands. The steamer trip from Perth to Dundee makes a local ploy rather than a tourist link, so few Southrons set eyes on those fat banks backed by richly wooded hills and crags. A little above the confluence stand the ruins of Elcho Castle, which Baddeley dismisses as “commonplace,” and Black finds unworthy of any epithet; but the race it nursed still stands high among Scotland’s nobles; and in or about it was a lair of Wallace’s most daring adventures. A little below, over the Fife border, lies the old seaport of Newburgh, surrounded by outlying spurs of the Ochils that give fine prospects across the Carse of Gowrie upon the opposite amphitheatre of the Sidlaws. Tourists seldom stop at Newburgh to see the adjacent Lindores Abbey and Lindores Loch, and the site of one of Wallace’s battlefields: so much the worse for the tourist. Two or three generations ago, he could not so easily have avoided Newburgh, when it was a noted station of posting and coach traffic from Perth.

To me, the flat Rhynds about the mouth of the Earn are of special interest, since they were long the home of my forbears, edged off the Hill of Moncrieff by a junior branch of the same stock, then again taking refuge across the Tay, when their dwindled possessions here had been sold to the house of Elcho. And time was when the eyes of all Scotland turned to this now obscure corner. A mile south of the Earn’s boldest crook, about the Western Rhynd peninsula, Abernethy is still visited by antiquaries for its mysterious round tower, standing over seventy feet high beside the church that has given Dr. Butler, its incumbent, material for a goodly volume. He makes no doubt that this tower was built upon their native models by Irish ecclesiastics, refugees from rude Danish invasion of their own saintly island. The only other such structure in Scotland, left unruined, is at Brechin, both of them better built than the Irish round towers on which ’prentice hands may have been tried. Sculptured stones of still greater antiquity have here escaped iconoclastic zeal, to be broken relics of Abernethy’s former state, poor and out of the way as it stands now.

The guide-books are content to dismiss Abernethy as an “ancient Pictish capital,” but it was also a famed sanctuary till the Reformation, and even later, a place of pilgrimage to the oak-tree shading the grave of nine holy maidens. For a generation this became the metropolis of the Church of Alban, while its primacy was passing from Dunkeld to St. Andrews. Later on, it made a hotbed of Protestant zeal and of the fissiparous energy that rent Scottish Presbyterianism with fresh secessions. This is a matter on which I am tempted to be garrulous, as several progenitors of mine were leaders here, both of Kirk and Dissent, among them Archibald Moncrieff, minister of Abernethy for more than half a century, through the trying times of the Covenant. The parish church contains two communion cups given by those pious ancestors, in whose memory its font was presented by the late Sir Alexander Moncrieff, his own name better known to warriors than to priests.

In Bonnie Scotland, I made bold to bring up my generations-back grandparent, Alexander Moncrieff, one of the four Original Seceders; and now I would still further trespass on the reader’s patience by borrowings from the Travels of the Rev. James Hall of Walthamstow, who more than a century ago, halting at Abernethy, noted some amusing memories of those early Seceders. Ebenezer Erskine, ex-minister of Stirling, was the leader of the body; but Hall calls Abernethy their metropolis, and Moncrieff their patron, as being not only dissenting minister but chief laird of the parish—no very exalted rank when, according to this author, the title was given to any rent-free yeoman of the Ochils, such as one he mentions who supplemented an income of ten pounds a year by the trade of a carpenter, while the family “mansion” made a small public-house.

The dissenting minister of Abernethy was at least wealthy enough to build a new church for his adherents, which for a time served also as college of the new sect. Some score of students boarded with the farmers—at the modest rate of two shillings or so a week—attending divinity lectures of the laird, who is said, in case of need, to have ministered to their carnal as well as their spiritual wants. For further instruction they would walk into Perth to sit at the feet of Mr. Wilson, another father of Secession. In his old age Moncrieff was fain to hold classes at his own house of Culfargie. After his death in 1761, this Stoic school became peripatetic, moved first to Alloa with his younger son, William Moncrieff, then straggling about in the wake of its best qualified teachers, till the Seceders stooped their spiritual pride to share the national provision of university training, supplemented by a regular divinity college at Edinburgh. But it seems that their teaching in philosophy, apart from divinity, with Locke’s Essay on the Human Understanding as text book, went on for a time longer at Abernethy, under Matthew Moncrieff, heir to Alexander’s estate and ministry. Mr. Hall tells a sly story of a callow student in those later days, who from the Established minister borrowed a Euclid, which he got through in a week: “I have read all the enunciations, which seem to be true enough and very good reading; I did not trouble myself about the A’s and B’s.”

The poverty of the Seceders was not helped by their split into Burghers and Anti-burghers, the latter the more strict sect, who flourished rather in the north half of Scotland; then these sects again became cross-divided as “New Lichts” and “Auld Lichts,” burning dimly still in Mr. Barrie’s kailyard. Hall, himself a benighted Erastian, describes the Secession theory in general as “a mixture of Popish tenets with those of English dissenters.” He was so far right that the Seceders held, as strongly as any Hildebrand, that the State should be the servant of the Church, also that their body was the only true Church of Scotland, which clung faithfully to the Covenant, consecrated for a century as quasi-sacramental. Alexander Moncrieff, who stood doughtily by the CÆsarship of the house of Hanover, is said to have been hardly restrained from setting off for London to present the Covenant, on full cock, at the wigged head of George II.

Later on, the Covenant was quietly allowed to drop, and the Seceders relaxed their strict aloofness. Matthew Moncrieff, it seems, was of a cheerfully social disposition counteracting his hereditary fanaticism. There is a tradition that he had worn a red coat for a short time, fighting, as his father preached, for King George. He had a worldly turn for sport, and though he did not dare to shoot, he kept a couple of greyhounds, to the scandal of his congregation. The English parson reports a tale of him as well known. One Sunday, as he was riding across the Ochils to preach, a hare started up, at which he flicked with his whip, and even forgot himself so far as to gallop a little way after poor puss. For this offence he was delated by his own servant before the Presbytery, that rebuked him to contrition; then it would long be cast up against him how he had broken the Sabbath. When his name came up among the more severe, heads were gravely shaken: “He is a man that would gar anybody like him—but oh! that beast”—to which less strait-laced admirers would respond, “Hoot! he’s no’ a wrang man, for a’ the beast.” This phrase, “for a’ the beast,” Mr. Hall declares to have become proverbial in that part of the country as denoting a fly in the amber of character.

Matthew’s wife had a disintegrating effect on the body, a Miss Scott from Fife, who, if we may believe Hall’s informants, was only a Seceder skin-deep, and turned a natural bent for wit and raillery to making fun of her husband’s congregation. She did not scruple to be close friends with the parish minister, Dr. Gray, and his wife; then, while the dissenting laird still thumped his pulpit every Sabbath against the errors of Erastianism, the rival spiritual authorities lived on the best of terms through the week, as could not but go to temper sectarian bitterness, though for a time the more zealous Seceders frowned on this compromising intimacy, as Mr. Pickwick at Sergeant Buzfuz exchanging salutations with his own advocate. So, by and by, acrimonious zeal cooled down all round, dying out altogether in my own family, as “Sandemanianism” did among their neighbours the Sandemans. Some members of our line seem, indeed, to have backslidden far from ancestral austerity. A descendant of the Abernethy ministers became a London tradesman—landlord of the “Rainbow” in Fleet Street by some accounts—whose son, William Thomas Moncrieff, put on the stage Tom and Jerry, with other once popular plays that did not keep him from dying at the Charterhouse, a fellow-pensioner of Colonel Newcome. About the same time as John Home scandalised even the lukewarm Establishment by coming out as a playwriter, a tragedy less famous than Douglas had been published by John Moncrieff, who seems not to have long survived it; and nothing else is known of him but that he was a dominie of sorts at Eton, apparently private tutor to some sprig of nobility.

Of what came to be called United Presbyterianism and is now grafted on to the United Free Church, a sturdier root first flowered in this parish, ripening through generations into the gracious and kindly nature of the author of Rab and his Friends. The first of a notable succession of John Browns was a herd laddie here, who, like other barefooted Scottish loons, contrived to pick up Latin and Greek almost without schooling. There is a well-known story of his leaving his sheep for a night walk of twenty-four miles into St. Andrews to buy a Greek Testament, which was given him for nothing, on his proving that he could read it. He is said to have tried the packman’s trade, but to have carried it on in too unworldly spirit for success. When he applied for ordination among the Seceders, I am sorry to say that my forefather would have barred him out on suspicion that his learning came from the devil; but this firm believer in witchcraft was overruled, and the self-taught scholar grew to be famed as Dr. John Brown of Haddington.

These are hints of what spirit was fermenting about Abernethy under the cold Georgian star, when in Scottish straths and glens plain living nourished much high or hot thinking. A coarser spirit was not wanting when, as Mr. Hall notes, the public-houses of the neighbourhood did their chief trade on Sundays, with people tramping into Abernethy to attend the Seceder meetings, and those of the Relief Church that soon set up another standard of dissent. He gives at some length an anonymous report of the “occasion” here in 1776, that is, the annual administration of the Sacrament, spread out over a week, when preaching flowed all day in a great tent, surrounded with booths and stands to supply refreshment to a crowd estimated by thousands, the whole encampment stretching out the best part of a mile. If the preacher failed in fire or unction, his hearers, as in the House of Commons, would drop off to the beer-barrels, flocking back to the tent when some popular Boanerges broached hotter eloquence. Such scenes, a survival of Covenanting conventicles, often degenerated into the scandals of Burns’s “Holy Fair”; and it is only in our time that they cease to be recalled by the “Preachings,” now abolished among the leading churches as having become too much of a worldly holiday.

Travellers of Mr. Hall’s period had no admiration for the “dreary glen of Abernethy,” nor much for the more richly planted Glenfarg into which it leads, the latter now the main pass from Fife into Perthshire. But this tourist parson duly admired the view from the Wicks of Baiglie, extolled by Scott as unmatched in Britain, yet commonly missed by railroad tourists since the leisurely day when the charms of Glenfarg inspired Ruskin, at the precocious age of seven, to verse which may be left unquoted. The Ruskin carriage, indeed, came by the new turnpike that shirks that higher ground where Scott gained life-long memories of the delight with which, as a boy of fifteen, making his first independent excursion, from the back of his pony he looked down on such an “inimitable landscape.”

This reminiscence of his touches a chord in my own heart, for it was on a boy’s pony that I, too, made wide

acquaintance with Strathearn and Strath Tay. But in my case there were hindrances that may not have presented themselves to the begetter of Waverley. To him this choice country might not be so much shut up by high park walls, or by enclosures of the rich strath lands. And in my day there were toll bars on the roads, when a schoolboy’s pocket-money was scrimper than seems to be the lot of this generation. One could not ride a dozen miles in any direction without counting the cost. The cheapest roads were twopenny ones, which thus became the most familiar. On one or two, the charge for my small steed was threepence, which required more consideration. One forbidding highway proudly demanded fourpence, though on it you could trot a couple of miles before reaching the expensive barrier. And when one had treated oneself to a fourpenny scamper along it, there came a second lion on that path. For more than a mile a railway ran beside the road, on the same level, separated only by a hedge, as alarming to inexperienced Highland shelties as the broad bridge on which another railway crossed another road askew, so as to form a miniature Grotto of Prosilippo, where overhead might come rumbling an invisible thunderstorm as one sped through its gloomy pass. Once, having paid my fourpence, I had pushed on almost to the end of the perilous stretch, when a train puffed and rattled up to meet me, which my horsemanship failed to make the pony face in a philosophic spirit. For all I could do, it swerved round and took to racing the engine along the flat road, for a time keeping company with its bogy. On that highway race, John Gilpin would not have been in it. If I had no wig to fly away, and no stone bottles swinging by my side, what bothered me was having an open knife in my hand, with which I had been cutting a switch from the hedgerow, as the monster came upon us from round a corner. Our headlong course was at last stopped by a gipsy or such-like wayfarer, as shamefaced guerdon for whom I had only twopence in my pocket, nearly drained by that unconscionable toll. Such trivial reminiscences I set down partly to please myself, partly to explain how my familiarity with this region is oddly incomplete, as in the case of a student who knew all about Africa, America, and Asia, but had stopped subscribing to the EncyclopÆdia before it touched on Europe. Yet the reader must take fair notice that there are few roads hereabouts upon which I may not be tempted to trot out my own early memories; and if, belike, he likes not this mood of anecdotage, let him turn to the article on Strathearn in some ponderous cyclopÆdia or plodding guide-book.

Mr. Hall, for his part, did not despise the trout-fishing for which the Farg was notable in my youth; and he had a good day’s sport, when so few strangers sought its shady course that he found some difficulty in getting his host to make out a bill, that for two days’ entertainment of man and beast, including a bottle of wine and other beverages, came to less than ten shillings. By Culfargie, the little Farg runs into the Earn, here a goodly river of smooth channels and deep pools, meandering through a rich valley between the wooded bluffs of Moncrieff Hill and the green slopes of the Ochils. Except for its craggy walls, there is nothing Highland about this part of the strath, as thickly set with mansions, farms, and woods as any snug scene of England. Of it, I have already spoken in Bonnie Scotland; and will only add that Mr. Hall was scandalised at the numbers of old bachelors he found resorting to the Spa of Pitkeathly, then as frequented as “St. Ronan’s Well,” where it appears that bachelors, young and old, were very apt to get into mischief.

Above the Bridge of Earn, over which goes the high road to Perth, the river is crossed by the two converging railway lines that tunnel through Moncrieff Hill to burst into daylight on the Tay. It is the next reaches of the winding Earn that are hardly known to strangers, unless in glimpses from the train; yet here it flows by scenes of as much historic interest as beauty. Forgandenny is a picturesque village, beside which an old mansion, destroyed by fire, has been replaced by a new one, notable for its fine gardens, like so many other seats in the neighbourhood. Forteviot, a little higher up, has come down from the rank of an ancient royal seat. Here died Kenneth McAlpine, 860, after hammering the Picts into a new kingdom; and for three centuries later shadowy Scottish kings are seen flitting through a royal stronghold that stood on the tongue of land between the Earn and its tributary the May.

The May, one of the merriest and sweetest of Ochil streams, trips down by the park of Invermay and the “birks” sung before Burns. As “Endermay,” this spot inspired the Earn-born poet, David Mallet or Malloch, whom Dr. Johnson belittled, but he filled a considerable place in London literary life of his generation. Opposite Invermay, on the northern slope of the Earn, stands Dupplin Castle, seat of Lord Kinnoull, whose richly wooded grounds are now renowned, and the gardens nursing exotics such as an araucaria thought to be the largest in the kingdom.—“Oh, Dr. Johnson, Dr. Johnson, oh!” But these noble avenues stand on what was once Dupplin Moor, where in 1332 Edward Balliol and his English allies made such a slaughter among the Scots “that the dead stood as high from the ground as the full length of a spear,” and the work of Bannockburn was for a time undone; indeed the boy king David’s crown might have been wholly lost, had not Edward of England’s hands been then too full, grasping at the lilies of France as well as the Scottish thistle that so often proved a sore handful.

Above Dupplin comes Gask, home of the Oliphants, one of whom was to win victories of sentiment for the lost Jacobite cause dear to this family. Carolina, Lady Nairne, the “Flower of Strathearn,” had as warm a heart for her native stream as for memories of Prince Charlie.

The ruins of Gascon Hall beside the river claim to have made a refuge for William Wallace, when, hunted by a sleuth-hound through Gask wood, he struck off the head of his flagging comrade Fawdon, then could not so easily lay that traitor’s or hinderer’s ghost. The present mansion is the third or fourth worn out here by the Nairne family. It stands on the site of a Roman camp, with a Roman road beside it, one of many bits of way still locally known as “street roads.” At Gask we look over to the mouth of Strathallan, the pass between the Ochils and the foothills of the Grampians, that must often have echoed the clank of Roman arms. Across the moor of Orchill, with Wade’s military road running beside it, the Ardoch Camp is best preserved of such Roman fortresses in Britain, and one of the largest, laid out to contain an army of 25,000 men. And hereabouts, in Celtic stones and place-names, there are thick traces of still older history, overgrown by the plantations and steadings of a race enriched from regions where the CÆsars’ eagles never flew.

Ardoch stands out of the Earn basin, and the Allan flows to the Forth. From the end of the Ochils, the Ruthven Water is their last tributary to the Earn, whose next affluent comes off Highland moors. Strathallan Castle seems to belie its name in being on the north side of the pass by which the Caledonian railway debouches on a plain studded with notable names. Here is Tullibardine, cradle of the Atholl Murrays; Kincardine Castle shows how Montrose’s ancestral home was ruined by Argyll in their tit-for-tat warfare; and the gallant Grahames had Aberuthven for their burial-ground.

The chief place on this side is Auchterarder, where the first shot was fired in the Disruption of 1843. Nor is this the sole note of the neighbourhood in Scottish Church history. Behind Auchterarder, the upper waters of the Ruthven come down from Gleneagles, a beautiful gorge in the Ochils, leading over to Glendevon. Gleneagles was the old home of the Haldanes, now replaced here by their kinsman Lord Camperdown; but Mr. Haldane, whose name is familiar as author of our “Territorials,” has still a seat on the Ochil slopes at Cloanden. This war-minister—who rose to political note at an early age, for as a schoolboy I can remember being taken into his nursery to see him invested with his first dignity as “the new baby”—bears a name that has been better known to Scotland in connection with its religious life, when, a century ago, his grandfather and granduncle became the Wesleys of the Kirk then sunk to its zero of cold morality.

Robert and James Haldane, nephews of Admiral Duncan, began life as high-spirited lads with fair prospects of worldly fortune. The elder had dispositions towards the ministry, repressed at a time when the Scottish Church seemed no career for gentle blood; the younger declined the chance of a partnership in Coutts’ Bank. The one spent some early years in the Navy, while the other, entering the East India Company’s service, under family influence rose to be a captain at twenty-five, a post he could sell for a small fortune. Leaving the sea young, both brothers conceived an evangelical enthusiasm, at first somewhat tinged with the early hopes of the French Revolution, which so many nobler spirits of their day hailed as a new dispensation—

For the Haldanes, as well as for Wordsworth, the democratic heaven soon clouded over; and the brothers turned their zeal to the spread of the gospel, after the model of such Southron preachers as Charles Simeon and Rowland Hill, both of whom carried their awakening into Scotland. Robert sold his estate of Airthrey, beautifully situated on the Ochils, and proposed devoting his life and means to a mission in India, a scheme nipped in the bud by the authorities there. James took to field-preaching, to the scandal of parish ministers and magistrates, itinerating all over Scotland, through the Highlands, and as far as the Orkneys and Shetlands. Robert’s gifts were less in the way of eloquence; he rather gave himself to organisation of the effort, training lay preachers, buying circuses both in Edinburgh and Glasgow as chapels, and issuing the tracts which by his school were held as special means of grace.

Such proceedings on the part of laymen did not commend themselves to the clergy; the stern Seceders also looked askance on this new revival. The Haldanes, for their part, had soon drifted away from Presbyterianism; and when the circus-like Tabernacle, still to be seen on the side of the Calton Hill, was built at Robert Haldane’s expense, it opened as a Congregational Chapel, with James Haldane as pastor, who continued his evangelical tours. By and by differences of opinion arose in the new congregation; and both brothers went over to Baptist views. Robert, especially, in his zeal for soundness, was all along much given to controversy—with Zachary Macaulay over a plan for bringing young Africans to be educated in Britain, as later with his famous son anent the ballot; with the Bible Society for its backsliding in publishing the Apocrypha; with the degenerate Socinian Calvinism of Geneva; with the divers errors of Irvingites and Sandemanians; and with the Presbyterian “Voluntaries” as to their refusal to pay the “Annuity Tax,” which was the church rate of Edinburgh. In their old age the Haldanes found more fellowship in the Presbyterian Church, especially when it had been warmed by Free Church enthusiasm. They seem both to have been earnest and sincere in struggling after what they held for purity of saving truth; and when they died in the middle of last century, they could congratulate themselves on having stirred the life of their country in a way that might be better remembered had they not been concerned to leave “their work and not their name.”

Gleneagles has taken us too far from the Earn, to which we come back at Kinkell Bridge, below the castle and collegiate church of Innerpeffray, burial-place of the Drummonds. On the north side lies Madderty, where, near the railway line from Perth to Crieff, may be visited the remains of Inchaffray Abbey, whose Abbot so effectually asked a blessing on the Scottish arms at Bannockburn. On the south side of the river runs the older branch line from Crieff Junction, with a station for Muthill, a goodly village that a century ago was as large as Crieff, and a century before had been burned, with Auchterarder and other neighbours, by the old Pretender’s forces, the harmless inhabitants being hustled out into a January night by soldiers whom they had sometimes received as guests—a needless cruelty to be set against that Whiggish harrying of Glencoe.

Muthill has kept some notable ecclesiastical antiquities; and in my youth it had, what was a rarity for a Scottish village, an English “chapel,” if I remember right, not in communion with the Scottish Episcopal Church, but one of several scattered over Scotland that counted themselves as belonging to the Church of England, and looked to Carlisle as their diocesan see. I am not sure how far this body still holds out, its sap having been cut off by the refusal of later Carlisle bishops to exercise their functions across the Border; then for a time its congregations had to depend for a precarious supply of sacramental grace upon colonial and other stray bishops who could be engaged by the job. This small Church, in fact, represented the old evangelical party that for the last generation has been waning on both sides of the Border, while the Scottish Episcopalians of that day lay under a dark imputation of being “Puseyites.” Through one of its Episcopal ministers, Muthill had a chance of standing high in song and story, for his daughter, Mary Erskine, is said to have been loved in vain by Walter Scott. It was for her consolation, in the loss of a beloved child, that Carolina Oliphant wrote The Land o’ the Leal.

Muthill has another connection, now almost forgotten, with the religious life of Scotland. About the time of the Original Secession, to an Earnside farmer in this parish was born a son named John Barclay, who became a probationer in the Kirk, but soon fell out with its fathers upon his interpretation of saving doctrine. He founded a sect which took the name of the Bereans, as searching the Scriptures with peculiar zeal, where they seem to have found assurance of salvation as a leading tenet, on the strength of which they cultivated a grace of cheerfulness not too common among Calvinist believers. “Rejoice evermore” is the suggestive title of one of their founder’s books. Their communion spread over several parts of Scotland, even into England and across the Atlantic. When Mr. Hall was at Abernethy he heard of theirs as one of the most flourishing congregations at Newburgh, having for its head Alexander Pirie, who for a time had been professor of divinity at the Seceders’ rustic college, then from an Anti-burgher softened down into a Burgher, from which he passed on to the Relief Church, and finally found rest among the Bereans. The English parson, who goes out of his way for a sneer at Robert Haldane’s missionary devotion, is rather satirical on those dissenters, whom he inclines to lump with the Sandemanians, and hints at accusations of sinning that grace may abound. They are, he says, “drunk or sober, as merry as grigs.” What struck him most about their ceremonies was the social love feast in which they copied the Sandemanians; and he repeats a scandalous story of the Crieff congregation sending to a public-house to get wine on trust for this function. At Crieff, which may be called its native soil, the body held together till the middle of last century, when its property was divided by lot among the members; and, so far as I know, the Bereans are now everywhere extinct, unless, perhaps, in America, where so many sects have taken fresh root on virgin soil.

Muthill lies between the grounds of Culdees Castle and of Drummond Castle, the latter famous for its gardens, avenues, and nobly wooded demesne. In passing up Tayside, I have told how it came into Southron hands, when the power of its old lords split on the rock that wrecked so many another Jacobite family; while the neighbour house of Murray tacked and trimmed its fortunes into calm waters. Strathearn has dark memories of the feuds between those names. When the old church of Monzievaird was being turned into a mausoleum for the Ochtertyre family, a quantity of charred wood and calcined bones came to light to bear out the tradition how a band of Murrays, fleeing before Drummonds, took refuge in this church with their wives and children, and were there burned to death by the savage pursuers. For this atrocity, indeed, several Drummonds came to be executed at Stirling. Only one Murray had escaped the holocaust, by the help, it is said, of a Drummond who loved his sister; later, this Drummond having fled for refuge to Ireland, he in turn was helped to pardon by the man he had saved, and came back with the agname Drummond-Ernoch, handed down to the victim of another revolting tragedy told in the introduction to A Legend of Montrose.

Drummond Castle is the Versailles of Crieff, itself the capital of Strathearn, where it stands among lovely surroundings and notable mansions—Monzie, Abercairney, Cultoquhey, Inchaffray, Ochtertyre, names that “fill the mouth as the mountains the eyes.” Such sounding names are, of course, wreckage of the once familiar speech that has ebbed far back into the Highlands. I never met any one in Perthshire who did not speak English; and even a knowledge of Gaelic, I fancy, is exceptional in this southern half of the country, certainly so in the lower half of Strathearn. But I forget what writer of a century or so back can record that at Monzie Castle—recently burned—only a mile separated the English-speaking lodge-keeper from neighbours who could not understand his tongue. A German traveller, in the early years of Queen Victoria, noted the east-enders of Loch Tay as speaking English, while Gaelic was still common about the other end. In our own generation, old inhabitants of Crieff could remember how troops of shock-headed lads and lasses came tramping down from the glens—like the Schwabenkinder of Tirol—to learn English by working a summer on Lowland farms, turning an honest penny out of this course of education.

Not that Scotland was without schooling long before the days of School Boards. In out-of-the-way parts of the Highlands, as well as in Lowland Gandercleughs, Dr. Johnson could hear of day-schools, even boarding-schools, kept here and there under difficulties, perhaps in summer by a bookish youth who for his winter studies walked all the way to Aberdeen or Glasgow. When a society seemed necessary for the diffusion of Christian knowledge in the Highlands, thanks to John Knox every English-speaking and Shorter Catechism-conning parish, at least, had its dominie, who, thanks to those land-grabbing Lords of the Congregation, was often such a “downtrodden, underfoot martyr” as Carlyle deplores, eking out his exiguous dues by a medley of occupations, and by unworthy perquisites that fell to him at the annual cock-fighting holiday. He was fain not only to perform all the duties of his school, down to mending pens and sharpening the points of his tawse, but to act as precentor, session-clerk, and general man of business for the parish; “even the story ran that he could gauge.” He has been known to play the cobbler in his hours of ease. Not seldom he was a “stickit minister,” qualified to wag his head in a pulpit, if he could get one, hindered perhaps from that eminence by some infirmity, such as a tied tongue or a too red nose. Often he was a “character,” who has figured in many a tale told by graceless Roderick Randoms when they grew out of dread of his skelpings and palmies. The most famous of such presentments ought to be Jedediah Cleishbotham, who presents himself as quite superfluously editing the Tales of My Landlord; but few impatient readers of our day spend much time over the mystifying patter with which that Wizard of the North thought necessary to introduce his feats of imagination. I should like, by the way, to point out how the self-important schoolmaster of Gandercleugh seems to have sent a thriving progeny across the Atlantic. Surely it is one of his family who, as the Rev. Homer Wilbur, A.M., so long occupied a pulpit at Jaalam, Mass., where one “talented parishioner,” Hosea Biglow, might call cousins with the Peter Pattieson who penned a story when he should have been engrossing rudimentary instruction on the skins of the lower classes.

Let us drop a tear over the dominie, who in the last generation or two has been vanishing from the world of fact. His place is now taken by Normal-school teachers of both sexes, well-trained, well-inspected, and less ill-paid than their predecessors. Every young Scot gets such mouthful of learning as can be crammed into him; but, to copy Johnson’s coarse metaphor, I am not sure that there were not better bellyfuls going under the old dispensation of scholarship. With all his faults, of which whisky was apt to be the worst, the snuffy dominie had sometimes the knack of turning out silk purses among sows’ ears, and with the most imperfect tools. The general run of his pupils perhaps profited most by being kept out of mischief, wholesomely hardened to chastisement, and awed by the mysteries of Effectual Calling, while the choicer natures had their chance to be brought into touch with an inspiring example that showed them the way to learning, a more important course of education than the cleverness of teaching which goes to load the minds of a whole class with not always fruitful instruction.

And those rude schools of old days had this educational advantage, that the minister’s bairn, and even the laird’s, might tumble and quarrel with the cottar’s, picking up the local vernacular and accent, but little more harm at an age when all sons of Adam are in the savage state of development, not easily inoculated with the curse of snobbery that sets classes apart, barred from the kindly intercourse of the older generations, among whom gentle and simple knew their place too well for troublesome presumption or uneasy stand-offishness. The parish school at least was a little republic, tempered sometimes, indeed, by grudges of favouritism on the part of its president. While English squires and parsons still looked suspiciously on the three R’s for peasants, barefooted Scottish laddies, sometimes lassies, would tackle Latin, even Greek, under the village dominie, who sent forth some of his pupils into the world equipped at least with a turn of mind and a stirred ambition that put them at advantage wherever they went. But now they go out into a new world, in which man may not be so much master of his own fate. What self-help could do for him is, it seems, to be done rather by the State, conceived of as a national Trades Union, which need not consider the chance of national bankruptcy in providing for the general welfare. The very virtues that winged a prosperous career—thrift, industry, enterprise, force of character—become suspected for vices in the interest of the common herd. It is a bad lookout for Scotsmen in that golden age of mediocrity so glibly promised by certain social reformers, who might begin by doing away with prizes and punishments in schools, if they cannot altogether level down Nature’s distinctions.

My own first experience of school life was near Crieff, where I spent a year in the family of an English clergyman, whom I dimly remember as a model for the head of the Fairchild family. For all his austerity, my recollections are of cheerful days spent under his charge, and especially of a keen relish for meals, which may be connected with the fact that this was the only period in my life when I might not eat as much as I pleased. But also I have two painful memories of this place. The first is breaking my arm on the rocks of the Turret one Saturday afternoon, and not getting a doctor for it till Monday evening: my tutor, who had been a soldier before he took orders, and ought to have known better, judged the hurt no more than a sprain; then on Sunday I had to walk three miles to church, and back, with my arm hanging helpless, the torment relieved only by my brother holding it up. The other woeful experience was my own fault, and such as many sons of Adam have to confess. Some years later, I was sent on a holiday task, a ride of seventeen miles with a pointer pup to be handed over at Crieff to a keeper, whose lodge made a sort of canine academy. I was to dine at the “Drummond Arms,” after making sure to see my pony fed first—a sound instruction to heedless youth. Somewhat elated by this independent charge, as I strolled about the town it occurred to me that my own meal ought to be crowned by a cigar. It was my first; it cost twopence. “Left to myself” as I was in that rash undertaking, I had sense enough to seek out for it a secluded spot on the banks and braes of the Earn, where ere long my song would be—“How can ye bloom sae fresh and fair!”

At Crieff, with its two railways and everything handsome about it, we get upon a regular caravan route of tourists, too few of whom stop to discover the lochs, falls, and shaggy glens that around it are strung upon the Highland line, among hills making with the Earn valley a choice epitome of Perth scenery. I have already extolled this neighbourhood in Bonnie Scotland, so now I must pass quickly over the most picturesque part of Strathearn. Nothing could be prettier in its way than the walk up the Earn, foaming and rippling through its leafy banks, past wooded eminences, like Torleum, whose top makes a weather-glass for the countryside, and Tomachastle, crowned by a monument to Sir David Baird, the hero of Seringapatam. This local worthy’s widow cherished his renown regardless of expense, the model village of St. David’s, below Crieff, being also a memorial of him; but

the too towering obelisk on Tomachastle challenged a thunderbolt to rebuke the vanity of mortal fame.

Soon appear on either side mantled crags and bristling ridges, and the mountain moors begin to close in upon fields and parks. Half-way between Crieff and Loch Earn, Comrie stands at the head of the rich strath which now begins to take on the features of a Highland glen, still tamed by mansions and plantations. On one side the Ruchill Water comes in from Glenartney, where the stag was startled from his midnight lair by Fitzjames’s hounds; on the other, by Dunira, the Lednock rushes down a wilder ravine over which stands out a monument to Dundas, Lord Melville, head of the Tory oligarchy that to its own satisfaction ruled Scotland in the days of Pitt. This satrap is not so much admired by later leaders of Scottish politics. He has another tall column at Edinburgh in a line with statues of George IV. and Pitt, a trio of monuments denounced as “Vice standing between Tyranny and Corruption” by the Radical orator, Bailie Jamieson, who went to prison for such speeches, as his more widely famous son did for certain doings in South Africa.

As I write, newspapers record the death of a Dundas of Dunira, whose name takes me back half a century to the morning when two of his brothers breakfasted at our house on their way from school, wearing scarlet flannel, then known as “Crimean,” shirts, which, to us unsophisticated provincials, not yet “in the movement,” seemed below the dignity of Harrow boys. Dr. Keate would have agreed with us, who, in the former generation, gave an Eton culprit two extra cuts for the vulgarity of having a “checked shirt” to turn up in disclosing circumstances. Times are changed; but it is not so clear about nos et mutamur: one can fancy the schoolmasters and schoolboys of to-day still cocking a critical eye at changes of custom and costume, which in a few years will seem matters of course.

The stranger who, to a panorama of celebrated scenes flitting before his strained eyes, prefers settling down and photographing on memory characteristically charming landscapes, could not do better than set up his tent at Comrie, where he may come in for the excitement of one of its slight earthquakes. Among the many excursions radiating hence, he must not neglect to follow up the Earn to its parent lake. The last time I took this lovely walk, it was in company with the late Dr. Andrew Melville, Clerk of the Free Church, a name well-known in Scotland as reviving that of his forbears, the Reformation champions. He made his summer home at Comrie, which, through another sojourner, the widow of Lord Chancellor Cairns, had come to be a resort of the English sect called Plymouth Brethren; and I recall his telling me on our walk how a party of sisters of that ilk, invited together to a house at Comrie, proved to be hardly on speaking terms after a rent in this exclusive communion. It is not only in Scotland that Seceders split up into Auld Lichts and New. And in Scotland, by the way, the Wee Free Church that lately made such a profitable contention for the faith as once delivered to Calvinistic saints, begins to generate a fissiparous ferment, having already mutinied against the lay champion who led it to victory and booty. At least sects are fewer in Scotland, which seldom welcomes exotic divinity, its taste being for home-made dissensions. A local writer has an amusing account of a Plymouth Brother, at Crieff, roaring down a Mormon missionary who promised mounts and marvels across the Atlantic; but the contest did not tend to conversion or edification.

Our way up the Earn has led us by several eddies and backwaters of Scottish Protestantism; but now we pass into the shadow of the hills where the cross itself was dipped in fire and blood. When I walked up to Loch Earn with that kindly kinsman of mine, the railway did not go beyond Comrie, as it does now, under outlying masses of Ben Voirlich, where wooded knolls huddle below slopes of turf and rock and fern dappled by patches of brown or purple heather. We are here fairly in the Highlands; and from St. Fillan’s Hill, shooting up over the river, we look down upon a true central Perthshire prospect of a long lake stretching below high mountains; but else, as a disappointed Cockney complained, one can’t see the view for the hills.

The smart village of St. Fillans, spreading out along the loch foot in villakins of rusticating townsfolk, is a modern settlement, but it may have had ancient memories to forget, for here, or hereabouts, stood Dundurn, capital of the Pictish land called Fortrenn, which seems to have taken in Angus, along with Strathearn and the lower basin of the Tay. The island in the foreground was in later times lair of a gang of robbers named Neish, who in an ill turn for themselves undertook to rob a servant of the Macnabs, bringing their Christmas fare from Crieff. The Macnab of that day had a round dozen of Samsonlike sons, to whom, at their bare board, he significantly spoke—“The night is the night, were the lads but the lads!” On this hint the twelve set out, dragged a boat across from Loch Tay to Loch Earn, surprised the revelling Neishes at dead of night, and slew all but one youth who managed to slip off. Next morning they greeted their father with the outlaws’ gory heads and the boast, “The lads were the lads!” Another account makes them exclaim on this occasion, “Dread nought!” which has remained the Macnabs’ motto.

It is nearly sixty years ago that I spent a summer at St. Fillans, as yet hardly known to the outside world. At times that sojourn comes back to me as a dream of childish delight; but I was too young to gather a faggot of impressions that would serve when—

Perhaps the most prosaic English urchin stores up as warm memories of “days in the distance enchanted,” spent on the fattest claylands or the smoothest fen. Anyhow, one’s heart goes out to the bare-headed and bare-kneed youngsters, “hardy, bold, and wild,” who from the train are seen taking all chances of weather with frolic and glee on the banks of Loch Earn, heedless of the cloud of “Rudiments” and “Delectus” that will loom back upon them with the shortening autumn days.

Even less to be envied passengers have a good glimpse of this lake, as upon a shelf above the northern side they are whisked along a fine panorama, with Ben Voirlich’s rugged head for its background. Farther on, the shores grow tamer, where fields come down to the water edge; then, as by the scattering of houses at Lochearnhead the railway winds round its upper end, it overlooks a fine retrospect of the loch’s whole reach from St. Fillans. A few minutes more among bare green slopes, and we are at the Balquhidder Junction of the railway to Oban, standing lonely as if lost in the heart of the Highlands. The name seems misleading, for it is rather at the next halting-place southward, Kingshouse, that one turns off a couple of miles to Loch Voil and the Braes of Balquhidder, where Rob Roy rests at peace beneath a circle of chieftainly Bens, through which Glenfinlas would lead us to the Trossachs region.

Thus, whichever way we take through the heart of Scotland—by Atholl, by Breadalbane, by Strathearn—we come upon memories of the Macgregors. It is at Balquhidder that this famous stock was most at home in historic times; so here seems the place for some account of it, a story that will carry us back over all those regions, and bring most of the Perthshire clans on to its stage.