e other people who lived in it. The rooms
are good enough for an ordinary household's use, although the little
room that she had her supper party in when Rizzio was killed, wouldn't
be considered by Jone and me as anything like big enough for our family
to eat in. But there is a general air about the place as if it belonged
to a royal family that was not very well off, and had to abstain from a
good deal of grandeur.

If Mary Queen of Scots could come to life again, I expect the Scotch
people would give her the best palace that money could buy, for they
have grown to think the world of her, and her pictures blossom out all
over Edinburgh like daisies in a pasture field.

The first morning after we got here I was as much surprised as if I had
met Mary Queen of Scots walking along Prince Street with a parasol over
her head. We were sitting in the reading-room of the hotel, and on the
other side of the room was a long desk at which people was sitting,
writing letters, all with their backs to us. One of these was a young
man wearing a nice light-colored sack coat, with a shiny white collar
sticking above it, and his black derby hat was on the desk beside him.
When he had finished his letter he put a stamp on it and got up to mail
it. I happened to be looking at him, and I believe I stopped breathing
as I sat and stared. Under his coat he had on a little skirt of green
plaid about big enough for my Corinne when she was about five years
old, and then he didn't wear anything whatever until you got down to
his long stockings and low shoes. I was so struck with the feeling that
he was an absent-minded person that I punched Jone and whispered to him
to go quick and tell him. Jone looked at him and laughed, and said that
was the Highland costume.

Now if that man had had his martial plaid wrapped around him, and had
worn a Scottish cap with a feather in it and a long ribbon hanging down
his back, with his claymore girded to his side, I wouldn't have been
surprised; for this is Scotland, and that would have been like the
pictures I have seen of Highlanders. But to see a man with the upper
half of him dressed like a clerk in a dry goods store and the lower
half like a Highland chief, was enough to make a stranger gasp.

[Illustration: "Jone looked at him and said that was the Highland
costume."]

But since then I have seen a good many young men dressed that way. I
believe it is considered the tip of the fashion. I haven't seen