Scotland

Bücher

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Note THE author does not attempt elaborate word-pictures, that would seem pale beside the artists colouring. His design has been, as accompaniment to these beautiful landscapes, an outline of Scotlands salient features, with glimpses at its history, national character, and customs, and at the literature that illustrates this country for the English-speaking world. While taking the reader on a fireside tour through the varying airts of his native land, he has tried to show how its life, silken or home- spun, is a tartan of more intricate pattern than appears in certain crude impressions struck off by strangers. And into his own web have been woven reminiscences, anecdotes, and borrowed brocade such as may make entertaining stripes and checks upon a groundwork of information. The mainland only is dealt with in this volume. which it is intended to follow up with another on the Highlands and Islands. BONNIE SCOTLAND CHAPTER I THE BORDERS THE dawn broadens, the mists roll away to show a northward-bound traveller how his train is speeding between slopes of moorland, green and grey, here patched by bracken or bog, there dotted by wind-blown trees, everywhere cut by water-courses gathering into gentle rivers that can be furious enough in spate, when they hurl a drowned sheep or a broken hurdle through those valleys opening a glimpse of mansions and villages among sheltered woods. Are we still in England, or in what at least as far back as Cromwells time caIIed itseIf Bonnie Scotland It is as hard to be sure as to make out whether that cloudy knoll on the horizon is crowned by a peat-stack or by the stump of a Border peel. Either bank of Tweed and Liddel has much the same aspects. An expert might perhaps read the look or the size of the fields...