ere one is
surrounded by the relics of a thousand years, and stands under the
protecting shadow of a castle that seems lifted into the regions of
air.

The party took rooms on Prince's Street, a thoroughfare one hundred
feet wide and a mile in length, graced with noble monuments of art and
bowery pleasure-grounds. It is considered one of the most picturesque
streets in the world.

Around you are shops with splendid windows, statues, public gardens,
birds, and flowers; above you are houses six or eight stories high;
above these, on the rocky hillsides, are queer old buildings of other
times; and high over all is the Castle, cold and grand on its rocky
throne.

"I shall rest to-morrow, boys," said Master Lewis, "and shall let you
roam at will. Let us spend the evening in one of the public gardens."

After supper, the party went to one of these fragrant street-gardens.
The band of the Duchess of Sutherland's Own, as a certain Highland
regiment is called, filled the quiet air with delicious music.

The sun withdrew his light from the street, the gardens, and the tall
houses on the hills, but the Castle stood long in the mellowed glory
of the sunset.

But the sun left even the Castle at last, and then began a spectacle
that seemed like an illusion or fairy-land.

[Illustration: EDINBURGH CASTLE.]

Lights began to twinkle in the streets; then in the tall windows
above them. Now and then a whole face of an antique pile was
illuminated; now some little eyrie that seemed hanging in air burst
into flame; now a line of terraces began to twinkle. The lights crept
up the hillsides everywhere.

"I never saw any thing so beautiful!" said Ernest Wynn.

Every one talks of the Castle in Edinburgh, and the boys paid their
first visit to it, and saw it in its morning glory. On the highest
platform of the Castle, three hundred and eighty-three feet above the
sea, stands the celebrated old cannon Mons Meg, made in Mons, in
Brittany, in 1486. It had figured in so many wars and historic scenes,
that the Scottish people came to regard it as a national relic. The
site of the Castle is about seven hundred feet in circumference, and
on three sides it seems just a bare rock, rising almost
perpendicularly in air.

[Illustration: HOLYROOD PALACE.]

The boys next visited Arthur's Seat, a high rock on the top of a hill,
in which there is a fancied resemblance to a chair. Queen Victoria
climbed up to it on a recent visit. It commands a