From Scotland to England—Western Route.

Stratford-on-Avon, September 13, 1902.

The finest expanses of heather that we saw in Scotland were on the great moors through which our train ran southwards from Inverness, a rolling sea of pinkish purple bloom, stretching for miles and miles on every hand. Farther down we enjoyed the picturesqueness of the Pass of Killiecrankie, but it was the history here rather than the scenery which interested us, for it was here that Claverhouse, the stony-hearted persecutor of the Covenanters, fought and won his last battle, but lost his own life. Still farther south, at Dunkeld, we were reminded of the heroic and successful resistance made by the staunch men of Galloway to the hitherto victorious Highlanders, well described in Mr. Crockett's Lochinvar, which, as many of my young readers know, is a sort of sequel to The Men of the Moss Hags.

The Tay at Perth is a noble stream. It is said that when the Romans came in sight of it, they exclaimed, "Ecce Tiber! Ecce campus Martius!" The scornful resentment which Scotchmen feel at this comparison of their beautiful river to the more famous Italian stream, which Hawthorne somewhere describes as "a mud puddle in strenuous motion," is expressed in the lines which Sir Walter Scott has placed at the head of the first chapter of his Fair Maid of Perth:

It has been whimsically said that Perth is the smallest city in the world, because it is situated between two inches. Inch was the old Scottish word denoting an island or meadow. We were most interested, of course, in the North Inch, where the judicial combat took place between the two clans, and in which Henry Wynd and Conachar were engaged. The name of one of these clans, the Clan Quhele, reminded me of the thrifty little town built up by the Highland Scotch element in eastern North Carolina. They called the town "Quhele." But the other native elements of the population, not appreciating Scotch tradition and what seemed to them an outlandish name, changed it in common use to "Shoe Heel," and this undignified designation of their town so completely ousted the other that the people by act of legislature had the name changed to "Maxton," that is, Mac's Town, for nine-tenths of the people in that region are Macs, and mighty good people they are, too. We visited the Fair Maid's House, and in the evening read the Magician's romance about her. Through the great kindness of relatives and boyhood companions of friends of ours in Richmond, who had the good fortune to be born and brought up in Perth, we were given every opportunity to see the interesting old city from every point of view, and both those of us who climbed to the top of Kinnoul Hill, which an old traveller once called "the glory of Scotland," and those of us who drove with the kind friends above mentioned to Scone Palace, whence the ancient crowning stone now in Westminster Abbey was taken, were fully agreed that the place richly deserved its affectionate name of "The Fair City." One member of our party made an excursion one day from Perth to Kirriemuir, the "Thrums" of Mr. Barrie's stories, while two others devoted the day to an excursion in the other direction to the beautifully situated town of Crieff, world renowned as a health resort. Here we were most pleasantly entertained by the kind friends in whose delightful home I was a guest at Glasgow in 1896. Any one of the drives about Crieff on a perfect day, such as we had, will give one a new impression of the loveliness of Perthshire, the district of Scotland to which Sir Walter awards the palm for beauty.

On my former visit, I had made a detour from Perth, in this same direction, for the purpose of seeing Logiealmond, the "Drumtochty" of Ian Maclaren, which is only a few miles from Crieff, and had visited the Free Church, in which the young pastor of the Bonnie Brier Bush stories preached "his mother's sermon," and "spoke a gude word for Jesus Christ"; and the Established Church, where, under a big elm, the nippy tongue of Jamie Soutar was wont to wag on Sunday mornings; and the farm of Burnbrae, and other places in the glen which has now become so famous. I am sorry to say that Dr. John Watson's later development, both theological and literary, has not been so satisfactory as was once expected.

On our way down to Edinburgh we had a glimpse from the car windows of Loch Leven, and the island castle in which Mary Queen of Scots was confined to keep her out of mischief, and in connection therewith recalled what we could of The Monastery and The Abbot, the former one of the least successful, and the latter one of the most successful of Scott's romances. We had a glimpse also of Dunfermline, the birthplace of Andrew Carnegie, to say nothing of its ancient renown, crossed the Forth Bridge once more, made a brief stay in Edinburgh, and pushed on to Ayr, passing the battlefield of Ayrsmoss and other points of interest in connection with the Covenanters. We could give only two days to Ayr, but saw the birthplace of Burns, Auld Alloway Kirk, Bonnie Doon, and the various memorials of the poet; then went to Dumfries principally to see the Burns monuments there, passing reluctantly through the Covenanter country without stopping. From Dumfries we crossed the border, passing the original Gretna Green, where for more than a hundred years the runaway couples from England were married, and went direct to Keswick, at the head of Derwentwater, for the purpose of seeing something of the English Lake District. Skiddaw is a noble and satisfying mountain. We were interested also in the memorials of Southey at Crossthwaite Church. But Southey is responsible for the severest disappointment that comes to travellers in the Lake District. By his artificial and jingling lines on "How the water comes down at Lodore," he has raised expectations which the poor little falls at the foot of Derwentwater cannot realize. The American who came there and sat down on a rock and watched the falls for a while, and then declared that there was at least a gill of water coming down, was hardly guilty of a greater exaggeration in one direction than Southey in the other. But there is no other disappointment about the scenery of the English Lakes. It is lovely. It is said that a famous classical scholar, preaching to a small congregation of rustics in the Lake District, said to them, "In this beautiful country, my brethren, you have an apotheosis of nature and an apodeikneusis of theocratic omnipotence!" We trust that the sentiment which he tried to express was all right, notwithstanding the insufferably pedantic form of it. Of course we took the coach from Keswick to Windermere, stopping for the night at Ambleside, and visiting the grave of Wordsworth hard by the clear and placid stream, an ideal resting-place for the poet of nature.

Chester, with its quaint Rows, and red sandstone cathedral, and its high promenade on top of the walls encircling the old part of the town, and especially its Roman remains—for Chester is fundamentally a Roman town, as its name indicates (it was the Castra of the Twentieth Legion)—interested us, as did also Eaton Hall, the magnificent seat of the Duke of Westminster, three miles distant; but we had rain, rain, rain, and besides, we had lingered so long in the fascinating "land of the mountain and the flood" that we were anxious to push on to places of still more interest to us. So we did not tarry there long. We treated Coventry, Kenilworth, Leamington, and even Lichfield, in the same touch-and-go fashion. We could not bring ourselves to omit Lichfield altogether, partly because of its lovely cathedral, but chiefly because it was the town of Dr. Samuel Johnson, the greatest man of books that ever lived. Therefore, we stopped there long enough to go through the rich collection of Johnson relics in the house where he was brought up, to study the monument to him in the marketplace in front, and to inspect the cathedral. Boswell's Life of Johnson is the best biography in the English language. The careful reading of it is a pretty thorough education in literature. I fear it is not read as much as it used to be. People are too much occupied with the ephemeral effusions of contemporary mediocrities to read the great books.

Our visit to this town reminded me of a story that I had read years ago of a certain bishop of Lichfield who had a reputation for repartee and ready replies to difficult questions. In a crowded room one evening, when it was not known that the bishop was present, the conversation turned to this aptness of his, and a man said, "I should like to meet that bishop of Lichfield; I'd put a question to him that would puzzle him."

"Very well," said a voice from another corner, "now is your time, for I am the bishop."

The first speaker was somewhat taken aback, but recovered himself sufficiently to say, "Well, my lord, can you tell me the way to heaven?"

"Nothing easier," answered the bishop, "you have only to turn to the right and go straight ahead."

And now we are off for the Shakespeare country, not far away. Very different from the bold scenery of Scotland is that of this part of England. Here one sees—

The most striking feature of an English landscape to an American eye is the extraordinary finish—lawns, fields, fences, houses, roads, are all such as can belong only to an old and prosperous country. An Oxford man, when asked how they managed to get such perfect sward in the college lawns, replied: "It is the simplest thing in the world; you have only to mow and roll regularly for about four hundred years."

At Stratford-on-Avon we stayed at the Red Horse Inn, Washington Irving's hotel when here. We visited Anne Hathaway's cottage, the school of the poet's boyhood, the ugly and staring Shakespeare memorial, and the other points of interest. It is familiar ground to most readers, and I shall refer to only two things.

In the church where Shakespeare is buried there is an American window, not yet finished when I first saw it, and there was a box hard by to receive the donations of American visitors. The rich stained glass represents the infant Christ in his mother's arms, and on either side English and American worthies in attitudes of adoration. On one side are Amerigo Vespucci, Christopher Columbus and William Penn, representative pious Americans, and on the other Bishop Egwin of Worcester, "King Charles the Martyr and Archbishop Laud!" The fact that more than two thousand dollars have been contributed for this window is conclusive proof of the humiliating fact that a large number of the Americans who visit Stratford are ninnies. I venture the assertion that their admiration for Shakespeare is humbug, that they have not sufficient intelligence to appreciate his real worth, and that they could stand about as good an examination on the immortal plays as that King George who, after vain attempts to read Shakespeare, gave it up with the remark that it was very dull stuff. He was "clever just like a donkey," as one of our European guides said when we asked him about the intellectual grade of certain monks, and these citizens of a free country who give money for a monument to Charles I. and Archbishop Laud are equally clever. I was speaking of this window to one of the most interesting men I met in Scotland, my host, the learned and distinguished Dr. W. G. Blackie, and he put the whole thing into "the husk o' a hazel" with the remark that "Charles the First was one of the most incorrigible liars that ever lived." He was, and he was moreover the inveterate foe of every principle represented by the American Government. And yet Americans are contributing to a memorial window of him and Laud!

As one wanders about the streets of the quaint English town he is beset from time to time by groups of children, who in a kind of humming or chanting chorus recite the leading facts in the life of Shakespeare, for which they expect, of course, to receive a small fee. The substance and sound of this curious monotone have been represented approximately as follows: "William Shykespeare, the gryte poet, was born in Stratford-on-Avon in 1564—the 'ouse in which he dwelt may still be seen—'is father in the gryte poet's boyhood was 'igh bailiff of the plyce—one who shykes a spear is the meaning of 'is nyme," and so on. In like manner the London newsboys say, "Pipers, sir?" As a friend of mine puts it, they do not "label your trunks" here, but "libel your boxes," and they call the Tate Gallery "Tight." That reminds me of the queer pronunciation of many proper names in Great Britain. Of course you know that Thames is pronounced Temz, and Greenwich Grinij, and Beauchamp Beecham, and Gloucester Gloster, and Brougham Broom. But did you know that Kirkcudbright was pronounced Kirk-coÓ-bree, that at Cambridge they call Caius College Keys College, and that at Oxford they call Magdalen College Maudlen College? The Cockburn Hotel at which we stopped in Edinburgh is called Coburn. So Colquhoun is Cohoon, Wemyss is Weems, Glamis is Glams, Charteris is Charters, Methuen is Methven, Cholmondeley is Chumley, Marjoribanks is Marchbanks, Ruthven is Riven, DeBelvoir is De Beever and Menzies is Mingis. Worse yet, Bethune is Beeten, Levison-Gower is Luson-Gore, Colclough is Coatley, St. John is Sinjun, St. Leger is Silleger, and Uttoxeter is Uxeter. But, then, we have in Virginia the name Enroughty pronounced Darby. High Holborn in London is 'I 'Obun. Some of their contractions are remarkable. The name of Bunhill Fields, the great Nonconformist burying-ground, is short for Bone Hill. The famous charity school, where the boys wear blue coats, is called "The Blukkit School," instead of the Blue Coat School. Rotten Row, the fashionable track for horseback riders in Hyde Park, is an ugly contraction of the French words route de roi, the king's road, because there was a time when only the king was allowed to use it. I cannot leave this subject without telling you that the name of Dugald Dalgetty of Drumthwacket, who afforded you so much amusement when you were reading The Legend of Montrose, is called in Scotland Diggety instead of Dalgetty.

Other things of interest in this connection are that shoes are not shoes in England, they are boots. If you ask for shoes they will give you slippers. There are no overshoes, only galoches. No shirtwaists, nothing but blouses. You can't get a spool of thread, but a reel of cotton. Locomotive engineers are called "drivers," and conductors are called "guards." In Scotland all the church notices are "intimations."