s that I have seen between the Palisades and the Rocky
Mountains, I have derived no such emotion as I have felt when,
"gathering his glory for a grand repose," the sun set behind the
Grampians; and the peak of Schehallion, like a spearhead, cleft the
evening sky. Why, the Scottish exile thinks that the sun turns a
kindlier face to his native land than it does to countries less favored,
like the one who sang:--

"The sun rises bright in France,
And fair sets he;
But he's tint the blythe blink he had
In my ain countrie."

We are what we are, gentlemen, because the land of our birth is "Bonnie
Scotland," as well as the "Land o' Cakes." Its beauty has entered into
our blood; its majesty and sublimity have given us a certain elevation
of soul. Thus it came about that, beside the homely kailyard virtues of
our forefathers, and their stern uncompromising religious zeal, there
grew up in all their wild beauty such a profusion of the flowers of
song, of poetry, and of romance that you shall hardly find between
Tweed's silver stream and where the ocean billows break in thunder on
Cape Wrath, ten square miles of Scottish ground which have not been
celebrated in ballad, legend, song or story. Whence, think you, came
that affluence of melody with which every strath and glen and carse of
Scotland was vocal--melody that auld wives crooned at their spinning
wheel: lasses lilted at ewe-milking, before the dawn of day; fiddlers
played at weddings and christenings; and pipers sent echoing among the
hills to inspire the march of the warlike living or sound a lament for
the heroic dead? A long line of nameless Scottish minstrels had lived
and died generations before Burns and Ferguson, Tannahill and Lady
Nairne, and all the rest of our sweet singers took the old tunes and
gave them a form and vesture as immortal as their own fame. We are
called a practical, hard-headed people, and so we are; but the most
enduring part of our literature tells of the romantic ideals that
Scotsmen have cherished and the chivalrous deeds they have done. We are
thought to be severely logical; and if allowance be made for our point
of view, we are that also. But the unsympathetic student of Scottish
history will not get very far with his subject by keeping steadily in
mind our practicalness and our logic. If he thinks of these alone, he
will be apt to pronounce those Scotsmen fools who sacrificed two
centuries of progress for the barren, if glorious