ition is less sudden if we begin with a ride in
an open car along the coast of Scotland. Dusk had fallen on the
purple cloudlands of heather dotted with the white spots of grazing
sheep in the Scottish Highlands under changing skies, with
headlands stretching out into the misty reaches of the North Sea,
forbidding in the chill air after the warmth of France and suggestive of
the uninviting theatre where, in approaching winter, patrols and
trawlers and mine-sweepers carried on their work to within range of
the guns of Heligoland. A people who lived in such a chill land, in
sight of such a chill sea, and who spoke of their "Bonnie Scotland
forever," were worthy to be masters of that sea. The Americans who
think of Britain as a small island forget the distance from Land's End
to John o' Groat's, which represents coast line to be guarded; and we
may find a lesson, too, we who must make our real defence by sea,
in tireless vigils which may be our own if the old Armageddon beast
ever comes threatening the far-longer coast line that we have to
defend. For you may never know what war is till war comes. Not even
the Germans knew, though they had practised with a lifelike dummy
behind the curtains for forty years.

At intervals, just as in the military zone in France, sentries stopped us
and took the number of our car; but this time sentries who were
guarding a navy's rather than an army's secrets. With darkness we
passed the light of an occasional inn, while cottage lights made a
scattered sprinkling among the dim masses of the hills. A man might
have been puzzled as to where all the kilted Highland soldiers whom
he had seen at the front came from, if he had not known that the
canny Highlanders enlist Lowlanders in kilty regiments.

The Frenchmen of our party--M. Stephen Pichon, former Foreign
Minister, M. Rene Bazin, of the Academie Francaise, M. Joseph
Reinach, of the Figaro, M. Pierre Mille, of Le Temps, and M. Henri
Ponsot--who had never been in Scotland before, were on the look out
for a civilian Scots in kilts and were grievously disappointed not to find
a single one.

This night ride convinced me that however many Germans might be
moving about in England under the guise of cockney or of Lancashire
dialects in quest of information, none has any chance in Scotland. He
could never get the burr, I am sure, unless born in Scotland; and if he
were, once he had it the triumph ought to make him a Scotsman at
heart.

The off