ssengers, but its green side was dotted with the camps of travelling
families: one cumbered with a great waggonful of household stuff,
settlers going to occupy a ranche they had taken up in Mendocino, or
perhaps Tehama County; another, a party in dust-coats, men and women,
whom we found camped in a grove on the roadside, all on pleasure bent,
with a Chinaman to cook for them, and who waved their hands to us as we
drove by.

IV

THE SCOT ABROAD

A few pages back, I wrote that a man belonged in these days to a variety
of countries; but the old land is still the true love, the others are
but pleasant infidelities. Scotland is indefinable; it has no unity
except upon the map. Two languages, many dialects, innumerable forms of
piety, and countless local patriotisms and prejudices, part us among
ourselves more widely than the extreme east and west of that great
continent of America. When I am at home, I feel a man from Glasgow to be
something like a rival, a man from Barra to be more than half a
foreigner. Yet let us meet in some far country, and, whether we hail
from the braes of Manor or the braes of Mar, some ready-made affection
joins us on the instant. It is not race. Look at us. One is Norse, one
Celtic, and another Saxon. It is not community of tongue. We have it not
among ourselves; and we have it almost to perfection, with English, or
Irish, or American. It is no tie of faith, for we detest each other's
errors. And yet somewhere, deep down in the heart of each one of us,
something yearns for the old land, and the old kindly people.

Of all mysteries of the human heart, this is perhaps the most
inscrutable. There is no special loveliness in that grey country, with
its rainy, sea-beat archipelago; its fields of dark mountains; its
unsightly places, black with coal; its treeless, sour, unfriendly-looking
corn-lands; its quaint, grey, castled city, where the bells clash of a
Sunday, and the wind squalls, and the salt showers fly and beat. I do
not even know if I desire to live there; but let me hear, in some far
land, a kindred voice sing out, "Oh, why left I my hame?" and it seems at
once as if no beauty under the kind heavens, and no society of the wise
and good, can repay me for my absence from my country. And though I think
I would rather die elsewhere, yet in my heart of hearts I long to be
buried among good Scots clods. I will say it fairly,