it grows on me with
every year: there are no stars so lovely as Edinburgh street-lamps. When
I forget thee, auld Reekie, may my right hand forget its cunning!

The happiest lot on earth is to be born a Scotchman. You must pay for it
in many ways, as for all other advantages on earth. You have to learn
the paraphrases and the shorter catechism; you generally take to drink;
your youth, as far as I can find out, is a time of louder war against
society, of more outcry and tears and turmoil, than if you had been
born, for instance, in England. But somehow life is warmer and closer;
the hearth burns more redly; the lights of home shine softer on the
rainy street; the very names, endeared in verse and music, cling nearer
round our hearts. An Englishman may meet an Englishman to-morrow, upon
Chimborazo, and neither of them care; but when the Scotch wine-grower
told me of Mons Meg, it was like magic.

"From the dim shieling on the misty island
Mountains divide us, and a world of seas;
Yet still our hearts are true, our hearts are Highland,
And we, in dreams, behold the Hebrides."

And, Highland and Lowland, all our hearts are Scottish.

Only a few days after I had seen M'Eckron, a message reached me in my
cottage. It was a Scotchman who had come down a long way from the hills
to market. He had heard there was a countryman in Calistoga, and came
round to the hotel to see him. We said a few words to each other; we had
not much to say--should never have seen each other had we stayed at
home, separated alike in space and in society; and then we shook hands,
and he went his way again to his ranche among the hills, and that was
all.

Another Scotchman there was, a resident, who for the mere love of the
common country, douce, serious, religious man, drove me all about the
valley, and took as much interest in me as if I had been his son: more,
perhaps; for the son has faults too keenly felt, while the abstract
countryman is perfect--like a whiff of peats.

And there was yet another. Upon him I came suddenly, as he was calmly
entering my cottage, his mind quite evidently bent on plunder: a man of
about fifty, filthy, ragged, roguish, with a chimney-pot hat and a tail
coat, and a pursing of his mouth that might have been envied by an elder
of the kirk. He had just such a face as I have seen a dozen times behind
the plate.

"Hullo, sir!" I cried. "Where are you going?"

He turned round without a