s of flowers and cages of
song-birds in the cabin-windows, and for one particular Dutch skipper
who would sit all day in slippers on the break of the poop, smoking a
long German pipe; Wemyss (pronounced Weems) with its bat-haunted caves,
where the Chevalier Johnstone, on his flight from Culloden, passed a
night of superstitious terrors; Leven, a bald, quite modern place,
sacred to summer visitors, whence there has gone but yesterday the tall
figure and the white locks of the last Englishman in Delhi, my uncle Dr.
Balfour, who was still walking his hospital rounds, while the troopers
from Meerut clattered and cried "Deen Deen" along the streets of the
imperial city, and Willoughby mustered his handful of heroes at the
magazine, and the nameless brave one in the telegraph office was perhaps
already fingering his last despatch; and just a little beyond Leven,
Largo Law and the smoke of Largo town mounting about its feet, the town
of Alexander Selkirk, better known under the name of Robinson Crusoe.
So on the list might be pursued (only for private reasons, which the
reader will shortly have an opportunity to guess) by St. Monans, and
Pittenweem, and the two Anstruthers, and Cellardyke, and Crail, where
Primate Sharpe was once a humble and innocent country minister: on to
the heel of the land, to Fife Ness, overlooked by a sea-wood of matted
elders and the quaint old mansion of Balcomie, itself overlooking but
the breach or the quiescence of the deep--the Carr Rock beacon rising
close in front, and as night draws in, the star of the Inchcape reef
springing up on the one hand, and the star of the May Island on the
other, and farther off yet a third and a greater on the craggy foreland
of St. Abb's. And but a little way round the corner of the land,
imminent itself above the sea, stands the gem of the province and the
light of mediaeval Scotland, St. Andrews, where the great Cardinal Beaton
held garrison against the world, and the second of the name and title
perished (as you may read in Knox's jeering narrative) under the knives
of true-blue Protestants, and to this day (after so many centuries) the
current voice of the professor is not hushed.

Here it was that my first tour of inspection began, early on a bleak
easterly morning. There was a crashing run of sea upon the shore, I
recollect, and my father and the man of the harbour light must sometimes
raise their voices to be audible. Perhaps it is from this circumstance,
th