. In another
hour we were walking through Edinburg, admiring its palace-like
edifices, and stopping every few minutes to gaze up at some lofty
monument. Really, thought I, we call Baltimore the "Monumental City" for
its two marble columns, and here is Edinburg with one at every
street-corner! These, too, not in the midst of glaring red buildings,
where they seem to have been accidentally dropped, but framed in by
lofty granite mansions, whose long vistas make an appropriate background
to the picture.

We looked from Calton Hill on Salisbury Crags and over the Firth of
Forth, then descended to dark old Holyrood, where the memory of lovely
Mary lingers like a stray sunbeam in her cold halls, and the fair,
boyish face of Rizzio looks down from the canvass on the armor of his
murderer. We threaded the Canongate and climbed to the Castle; and
finally, after a day and a half's sojourn, buckled on our knapsacks and
marched out of the Northern Athens. In a short time the tall spire of
Dalkeith appeared above the green wood, and we saw to the right, perched
on the steep banks of the Esk, the picturesque cottage of Hawthornden,
where Drummond once lived in poetic solitude. We made haste to cross the
dreary waste of the Muirfoot Hills before nightfall, from the highest
summit of which we took a last view of Edinburg Castle and the Salisbury
Crags, then blue in the distance. Far to the east were the hills of
Lammermuir and the country of Mid-Lothian lay before us. It was all
_Scott_-land. The inn of Torsonce, beside the Gala Water, was our
resting-place for the night. As we approached Galashiels the next
morning, where the bed of the silver Gala is nearly emptied by a number
of dingy manufactories, the hills opened, disclosing the sweet vale of
the Tweed, guarded by the triple peak of the Eildon, at whose base lay
nestled the village of Melrose.

I stopped at a bookstore to purchase a view of the Abbey; to my surprise
nearly half the works were by American authors. There wore Bryant,
Longfellow, Channing, Emerson, Dana, Ware and many others. The
bookseller told me he had sold more of Ware's Letters than any other
book in his store, "and also," to use his own words, "an immense number
of the great Dr. Channing." I have seen English editions of Percival,
Willis, Whittier and Mrs. Sigourney, but Bancroft and Prescott are
classed among the "standard _British_ historians."

Crossing the Gala we ascended a hill on the road to Selkirk,