se ever
asked her to marry him. Ah, how grateful I ought to be that I am free
to say 'yes', if a kilt ever asks me to be his! Poor Penelope, yoked to
your commonplace trousered Beresford! (I wish the tram would go faster!)
You must capture one of them, by fair means or foul, Penelope, and
Salemina and I will hold him down while you paint him,--there they are,
they are there somewhere, don't you hear them?"

There they were indeed, filing down the grassy slopes of the Gardens,
swinging across one of the stone bridges, and winding up the Castlehill
to the Esplanade like a long glittering snake; the streamers of their
Highland bonnets waving, their arms glistening in the sun, and the
bagpipes playing 'The March of the Cameron Men.' The pipers themselves
were mercifully hidden from us on that first occasion, and it was well,
for we could never have borne another feather's weight of ecstasy.

It was in Princes Street that we had alighted,--named thus for the
prince who afterwards became George IV.--and I hope he was, and is,
properly grateful. It ought never to be called a street, this most
magnificent of terraces, and the world has cause to bless that interdict
of the Court of Session in 1774 which prevented the Gradgrinds of the
day from erecting buildings along its south side,--a sordid scheme that
would have been the very superfluity of naughtiness.

It was an envious Glasgow body who said grudgingly, as he came out of
Waverley Station, and gazed along its splendid length for the
first time, "Weel, wi' a' their haverin', it's but half a street
onyway!"--which always reminded me of the Western farmer who came from
his native plains to the beautiful Berkshire hills. "I've always heard
o' this scenery," he said. "Blamed if I can find any scenery; but if
there was, nobody could see it, there's so much high ground in the way!"

To think that not so much more than a hundred years ago Princes Street
was nought but a straight country road, the 'Lang Dykes' and the 'Lang
Gait,' as it was called.

We looked down over the grassy chasm that separates the New from the
Old Town; looked our first on Arthur's Seat, that crouching lion of a
mountain; saw the Corstorphine Hill, and Calton heights, and Salisbury
Crags, and finally that stupendous bluff of rock that culminates so
majestically in Edinburgh Castle. There is something else which, like
Susanna Crum's name, is absolutely and ideally right! Stevenson calls it
one of the most