in white flashing foam in a rocky glade of the dell;
straths or savannas, like great prairie gardens, threaded by
meandering rivers and studded with wheat in sheaves, shocks and
ricks, seen over long reaches of unreapt harvests; villages,
hamlets, white cottages nestling in the niches and green gorges of
the mountains,--and all these sceneries set in romantic histories
dating back to the Danes and their doings in Scotland, make up a
prevista for the eye and a revista for the mind that keep both in
exhilarating occupation every rod of the distance from Kinross to
Perth.

The road via Glenfarg would be a luxury of the first enjoyment to
any tourist with an eye to the wild, romantic and picturesque.
Debouching from this long, winding, tree-arched dell, you come out
upon Strathearn, or the bottom-land of the river Earn, which joins
the Tay a few miles below. The term strath is peculiarly a Scottish
designation which many American readers may not have fully
comprehended, although it is so blended with the history and romance
of this country. It is not a valley proper, as we use that term; as
the Valley of the Mississippi or the Valley of the Connecticut. If
the word were admissible, it might be called most descriptively the
land-bay of a river, at a certain distance between its source and
mouth, such for instance as the German Flats on the Mohawk, or the
Oxbow on the Connecticut, at Wethersfield, in Vermont, or the great
onion-growing flat on the same river at Wethersfield in Connecticut.
These straths are numerous in Scotland, and constitute the great
productive centres of the mountain sections. They are generally
cultivated to the highest perfection of agricultural science and
economy and are devoted mostly to grain. As they are always walled
in by bald-headed mountains and lofty hills, cropped as high as man
and horse can climb with a plough and planted with firs and larches
beyond, they show beautifully to the eye, and constitute, with these
surroundings, the peculiar charm of Scotch scenery. The term is
always prefixed to the name of the river, as Strathearn, Strathspey,
etc.

I noticed on this day's walk the same singular habit that struck me
in the north part of Yorkshire; that is, of cutting inward upon the
standing grain. Several persons, frequently women and boys, follow
the mowers, and pick up the swath and bind it into sheaves, using no
rake at all in the process. So pertinaciously they seem to adhere