ife and knew a thing or two about the age we
live in. We were deep in talk, whirling between Peterborough and London;
among other things, he began to describe some piece of legal injustice
he had recently encountered, and I observed in my innocence that things
were not so in Scotland. "I beg your pardon," said he, "this is a matter
of law." He had never heard of the Scots law; nor did he choose to be
informed. The law was the same for the whole country, he told me
roundly; every child knew that. At last, to settle matters, I explained
to him that I was a member of a Scottish legal body, and had stood the
brunt of an examination in the very law in question. Thereupon he looked
me for a moment full in the face and dropped the conversation. This is a
monstrous instance, if you like, but it does not stand alone in the
experience of Scots.

England and Scotland differ, indeed, in law, in history, in religion, in
education, and in the very look of nature and men's faces, not always
widely, but always trenchantly. Many particulars that struck Mr. Grant
White, a Yankee, struck me, a Scot, no less forcibly; he and I felt
ourselves foreigners on many common provocations.[2]

A Scotsman may tramp the better part of Europe and the United States,
and never again receive so vivid an impression of foreign travel and
strange lands and manners as on his first excursion into England. The
change from a hilly to a level country strikes him with delighted
wonder. Along the flat horizon there arise the frequent venerable towers
of churches. He sees at the end of airy vistas the revolution of the
windmill sails. He may go where he pleases in the future; he may see
Alps, and Pyramids, and lions; but it will be hard to beat the pleasure
of that moment. There are, indeed, few merrier spectacles than that of
many windmills bickering together in a fresh breeze over a woody
country; their halting alacrity of movement, their pleasant busyness,
making bread all day with uncouth gesticulations, their air,
gigantically human, as of a creature half alive, put a spirit of romance
into the tamest landscape. When the Scottish child sees them first he
falls immediately in love; and from that time forward windmills keep
turning in his dreams. And so, in their degree, with every feature of
the life and landscape. The warm, habitable age of towns and hamlets;
the green, settled, ancient look of the country; the lush hedgerows,
stiles, and privy pathways in th