weakness; and so it comes about that I owed a certain journey, and
the reader owes the present paper, to a cat in the London Road. It was
judged, if I had thus brimmed over on the public highway, some change of
scene was (in the medical sense) indicated; my father at the time was
visiting the harbour lights of Scotland; and it was decided that he
should take me along with him around a portion of the shores of Fife; my
first professional tour, my first journey in the complete character of
man, without the help of petticoats.

The Kingdom of Fife (that royal province) may be observed by the curious
on the map, occupying a tongue of land between the firths of Forth and
Tay. It may be continually seen from many parts of Edinburgh (among the
rest, from the windows of my father's house) dying away into the
distance and the easterly _haar_ with one smoky seaside town beyond
another, or in winter printing on the grey heaven some glittering
hill-tops. It has no beauty to recommend it, being a low, sea-salted,
wind-vexed promontory; trees very rare, except (as common on the east
coast) along the dens of rivers; the fields well cultivated, I
understand, but not lovely to the eye. It is of the coast I speak: the
interior may be the garden of Eden. History broods over that part of the
world like the easterly haar. Even on the map, its long row of Gaelic
place-names bear testimony to an old and settled race. Of these little
towns, posted along the shore as close as sedges, each with its bit of
harbour, its old weather-beaten church or public building, its flavour
of decayed prosperity and decaying fish, not one but has its legend,
quaint or tragic: Dunfermline, in whose royal towers the king may be
still observed (in the ballad) drinking the blood-red wine; somnolent
Inverkeithing, once the quarantine of Leith; Aberdour, hard by the
monastic islet of Inchcolm, hard by Donibristle where the "bonny face
was spoiled": Burntisland, where, when Paul Jones was off the coast, the
Reverend Mr. Shirra had a table carried between tide-marks, and publicly
prayed against the rover at the pitch of his voice and his broad lowland
dialect; Kinghorn, where Alexander "brak's neck-bane" and left Scotland
to the English wars; Kirkcaldy, where the witches once prevailed
extremely and sank tall ships and honest mariners in the North Sea;
Dysart, famous--well, famous at least to me for the Dutch ships that lay
in its harbour, painted like toys and with pot