e, they
set themselves, in their dour and stubborn way, to make flowers grow
where Nature never intended such flowers to be; and they became so
cunning in the mystery of Adam's art that the Scottish gardener took the
place of direction wherever men laid out flower-beds or built
greenhouses throughout the civilized world.

On such simple lines of industry were laid the foundations of the
material greatness of Scotland--its mines, its furnaces, its machine
shops, its shipyards, its flax and jute mills, and all the other forms
of productive energy that have placed this little country and its few
millions of people in the front rank of the mechanical activity of the
world. But is it because of such triumphs as these that the name of
Scotland appeals so powerfully to the heart and the imagination of men?
I think not. Had our race been distinguished only for its care of the
bawbees, for its indomitable perseverance, its capacity to endure
hardship, its adaptiveness, and its enterprise, I trow that the
passionate pilgrim would not turn so eagerly to Scotland to cull the
flowers of poesy and breathe the air of romance. And remember, our
Scottish people are rather what the country has made them, than the
country is what it has been made by them. I heard Governor Roosevelt say
the other evening that the State of New York was merely another name for
the aggregate of the people in it, and I could not help thinking that
there must be in the Dutch blood a certain deficiency of imagination.
Can you imagine a Scotsman, however matter-of-fact and commonplace,
offering such a definition of his native land? The land of brown heath
and shaggy wood, land of the mountain and the flood, the land of our
sires, must be, indeed, part of ourselves; but it is also something
beyond and above ourselves,--the cradle of memories that will fade only
with our latest breath, the home of traditions, whose spell we could
not, if we would, shake off, the seat of beauty and of grandeur that we
somehow think are finer than the fairest or sublimest scenes that earth
can show. We know the feeling that prompted Byron to say:--

"When I see some tall rock lift its head to the sky,
Then I think of the hills that o'ershadow Culbean."

For, to most of us, in all our intercourse with Nature, the Scottish
mind supplies a Scottish background. There is nothing that affects me
quite so powerfully as a fine sunset; but I confess that, from all the
magnificent sunset