to this remarkable and awkward custom, that I saw two mowers walk
down a hill, a distance of full a hundred rods, with their scythes
under their arms, in order to begin a new swath in the same way;
four or five men and women running after them full tilt to bind the
grain as it fell! Here was a loss of at least five minutes each to
half a dozen hands, amounting to half an hour to a single man at the
end of each swath or work. Supposing the mowers made twenty in ten
hours from bottom to top of the field, here is the loss of one whole
day for one man, or one sixth of the whole aggregate time applied to
the harvesting of the crop, given to the mere running down that hill
of six pairs of legs for no earthly purpose but to cut inward
instead of outward, as we do. The grain-ricks in Scotland are
nearly all round and quite small. Every one of them is rounded up
at the top and fitted with a Mandarin-looking hat of straw, which
sheds the rain well. A good-sized farm-house is flanked with quite
a village of these little round stacks, looking like a comfortable
colony of large, yellow tea-caddies in the distance.

Reached Perth a little after dark, having made a walk of nearly
twenty miles after 11 a.m. Here I remained over the Sabbath, and
greatly enjoyed both its rest and the devotional exercises in some
of the churches of the city.

The Fair City of Perth is truly most beautifully situated at the
head of navigation on the Tay, as Stirling is on the Forth. It has
no mountainous eminence in its midst, castle-crowned, like Stirling,
from which to look off upon such a scene as the latter commands.
But Nature has erected grand and lofty observatories near by in the
Moncrieffe and Kinnoull Hills, from which a splendid prospect is
unrolled to the eye. There is some historical or legendary
authority for the idea that the Romans contemplated this view from
Moncrieffe Hill; and, as the German army, returning homeward from
France, shouted with wild enthusiasm, at its first sight, Der Rhein!
Der Rhein! so these soldiers of the Caesars shouted at the view of
the Tay and the Corse of Gowrie, Ecce Tiber! Ecce Compus Martius!
There was more patriotism than parity in the comparison. The
Italian river is a Rhine in history, but a mere Goose Creek within
its actual banks compared with the Tay. In history, Perth has its
full share of "love and murder," rhyme and romance, sieges,
battering and burning, royals and rebels. In the practi