andered about, following our rheumatic old guide, who pointed out
the different apartments to us and, in Scotch so broad that we had to
follow him very closely, told us the story of the fortress. From the
windows everywhere was the placid, shimmering summer sea, its surface
broken into silvery ripples by the fresh morning wind, but it was left
to the imagination to conceive the awful desolation of Dunnottar Castle
on a gray and stormy day. The old man conducted us to the keep, and I
looked over a year's record in the visitors' book without finding a
single American registered, and was more than ever impressed as to the
manner in which the motor car will often bring the tourist from the
States into a comparatively undiscovered country. The high tower of the
keep, several hundred feet above the sea, afforded scope for a most
magnificent outlook. One could get a full sweep of the bleak and sterile
country through which we had passed, lying between Aberdeen and
Stonehaven, and which Scott celebrated as the Muir of Drumthwacket. It
was with a feeling of relief that we passed out of the forbidding
portals into the fresh air of the pleasant July day, leaving the old
custodian richer by a few shillings, to wonder that the "American
Invasion" had reached this secluded old fortress on the wild headland
washed by the German Ocean.

From Stonehaven we passed without special incident to Montrose,
following an excellent but rather uninteresting road, though an
occasional fishing-village and frequent view of the ocean broke the
monotony of the flying miles. Montrose is an ancient town delightfully
situated between the ocean and a great basin connected with the sea by a
broad strait, over which a suspension bridge five hundred feet long
carried us southward. I recall that it was at Montrose where an obliging
garage man loaned me an "accumulator"--my batteries had been giving
trouble--scouting the idea of a deposit, and I gave him no more than my
agreement to return his property when I reached Edinburgh.

At Arbroath are the ruins of the most extensive of the Scotch abbeys,
scanty indeed, but still enough to show its state and importance in the
"days of faith." Here once reigned the good abbott celebrated by Southey
in his ballad of Ralph the Rover, familiar to every schoolboy. Ten miles
off the coast is the reef where

"The abbott of Aberbrothok
Had placed a bell on the Inchcape rock.
Like a buoy in the storm it floated