e fields; the sluggish, brimming rivers;
chalk and smock-frocks; chimes of bells and the rapid, pertly-sounding
English speech--they are all new to the curiosity; they are all set to
English airs in the child's story that he tells himself at night. The
sharp edge of novelty wears off; the feeling is blunted, but I doubt
whether it is ever killed. Rather it keeps returning, ever the more
rarely and strangely, and even in scenes to which you have been long
accustomed suddenly awakes and gives a relish to enjoyment or heightens
the sense of isolation.

One thing especially continues unfamiliar to the Scotsman's eye--the
domestic architecture, the look of streets and buildings; the quaint,
venerable age of many, and the thin walls and warm colouring of all. We
have, in Scotland, far fewer ancient buildings, above all in country
places; and those that we have are all of hewn or harled masonry. Wood
has been sparingly used in their construction; the window-frames are
sunken in the wall, not flat to the front, as in England; the roofs are
steeper-pitched; even a hill farm will have a massy, square, cold and
permanent appearance. English houses, in comparison, have the look of
cardboard toys, such as a puff might shatter. And to this the Scotsman
never becomes used. His eye can never rest consciously on one of these
brick houses--rickles of brick, as he might call them--or on one of
these flat-chested streets, but he is instantly reminded where he is,
and instantly travels back in fancy to his home. "This is no' my ain
house; I ken by the biggin' o't." And yet perhaps it is his own, bought
with his own money, the key of it long polished in his pocket; but it
has not yet been, and never will be, thoroughly adopted by his
imagination; nor does he cease to remember that, in the whole length and
breadth of his native country, there was no building even distantly
resembling it.

But it is not alone in scenery and architecture that we count England
foreign. The constitution of society, the very pillars of the empire,
surprise and even pain us. The dull, neglected peasant, sunk in matter,
insolent, gross and servile, makes a startling contrast with our own
long-legged, long-headed, thoughtful, Bible-quoting ploughman. A week or
two in such a place as Suffolk leaves the Scotsman gasping. It seems
incredible that within the boundaries of his own island a class should
have been thus forgotten. Even the educated and intelligent, who hold