served rooms, but we strolled listlessly about,
looking through the old arches, and peeping through slits and loopholes
into the interior.

The last verse of Queen Mary's lamentation seemed to be sighing in the
air:--

"O, soon for me shall simmer's suns
Nae mair light up the morn;
Nae mair for me the autumn wind
Wave o'er the yellow corn.
But in the narrow house of death
Let winter round me rave,
And the next flowers that deck the spring
Bloom on my peaceful grave."

Only yesterday, it seemed, since that poor heart was yearning and
struggling, caught in the toils of this sorrowful life. How many times
she looked on this landscape through sad eyes! I suppose just such
little daisies grew here in the grass then, and perhaps she stooped and
picked them, wishing, just as I do, that the pink did not grow on the
under side of them, where it does not show. Do you know that this little
daisy is the _gowan_ of Scotch poetry? So I was told by a "charming
young Jessie" in Glasgow, one day when I was riding out there.

The view from Craigmiller is beautiful--Auld Reekie, Arthur's Seat,
Salisbury Crags, and far down the Frith of Forth, where we can just
dimly see the Bass Hock, celebrated as a prison, where the Covenanters
were immured.

It was this fortress that Habakkuk Mucklewrath speaks of in his ravings,
when he says, "Am not I Habakkuk Mucklewrath, whose name is changed to
Magor-Missabib, because I am made a terror unto myself, and unto all
that are around me? I heard it: when did I hear it? Was it not in the
tower of the Bass, that overhangeth the wide, wild sea? and it howled in
the winds, and it roared in the billows, and it screamed, and it
whistled, and it clanged, with the screams, and the clang, and the
whistle of the sea birds, as they floated, and flew, and dropped, and
dived, on the bosom of the waters."

These Salisbury Crags, which overlook Edinburgh, have a very peculiar
outline; they resemble an immense elephant crouching down. We passed
Mushats Cairn, where Jeanie Deans met Robertson; and saw Liberton, where
Reuben Butler was a schoolmaster. Nobody doubts, I hope, the historical
accuracy of these points.

Thursday, 21st. We took cars for Aberdeen. The appropriation of old
historical names to railroad stations often reminds me of Hood's
whimsical lines on a possible railroad in the Holy Land. Think of having
Bannockburn shouted by the station master, as the train runs whistlin