very
merry over what the people at the restaurant would think of us--mother
and son they could not suppose us to be.

_Saturday._--And to-day it came--warmth, sunlight, and a strong, hearty
living wind among the trees. I found myself a new being. My father and I
went off a long walk, through a country most beautifully wooded and
various, under a range of hills. You should have seen one place where
the wood suddenly fell away in front of us down a long, steep hill
between a double row of trees, with one small fair-haired child framed
in shadow in the foreground; and when we got to the foot there was the
little kirk and kirkyard of Irongray, among broken fields and woods by
the side of the bright, rapid river. In the kirkyard there was a
wonderful congregation of tombstones, upright and recumbent on four legs
(after our Scotch fashion), and of flat-armed fir-trees. One gravestone
was erected by Scott (at a cost, I learn, of L70) to the poor woman who
served him as heroine in the _Heart of Midlothian_, and the inscription
in its stiff, Jedediah Cleishbotham fashion is not without something
touching.[7] We went up the stream a little further to where two
Covenanters lie buried in an oak-wood; the tombstone (as the custom is)
containing the details of their grim little tragedy in funnily bad
rhyme, one verse of which sticks in my memory:--

"We died, their furious rage to stay,
Near to the kirk of Iron-gray."

We then fetched a long compass round about through Holywood Kirk and
Lincluden ruins to Dumfries. But the walk came sadly to grief as a
pleasure excursion before our return....

_Sunday._--Another beautiful day. My father and I walked into Dumfries
to church. When the service was done I noted the two halberts laid
against the pillar of the churchyard gate; and as I had not seen the
little weekly pomp of civic dignitaries in our Scotch country towns for
some years, I made my father wait. You should have seen the provost and
three bailies going stately away down the sunlit street, and the two
town servants strutting in front of them, in red coats and cocked hats,
and with the halberts most conspicuously shouldered. We saw Burns's
house--a place that made me deeply sad--and spent the afternoon down the
banks of the Nith. I had not spent a day by a river since we lunched in
the meadows near Sudbury. The air was as pure and clear and sparkling as
spring water; beautiful, graceful outlines of hill and wood shut us