because
none of these ever asked her to marry him. Ah, how grateful I ought to
be that I am free to say 'yes,' if a kilt ever asks me to be his! Poor
Penelope, yoked to your commonplace trousered Beresford! (I wish the
tram would go faster!) You must capture one of them, by fair means or
foul, Penelope, and Salemina and I will hold him down while you paint
him,--there they are, they are there somewhere, don't you hear them?"

There they were indeed, filing down the grassy slopes of the Gardens,
swinging across one of the stone bridges, and winding up the Castle
Hill to the Esplanade like a long, glittering snake; the streamers of
their Highland bonnets waving, their arms glistening in the sun, and
the bagpipes playing "The March of the Cameron Men." The pipers
themselves were mercifully hidden from us on that first occasion, and
it was well, for we could never have borne another feather's weight of
ecstasy.

It was in Princes Street that we had alighted,--named thus for the
prince who afterwards became George IV.--and I hope he was, and is,
properly grateful. It ought never to be called a street, this most
magnificent of terraces, and the world has cause to bless that
interdict of the Court of Sessions in 1774, which prevented the
Gradgrinds of the day from erecting buildings along its south side,--a
sordid scheme that would have been the very superfluity of
naughtiness.

It was an envious Glasgow body who said grudgingly, as he came out of
Waverley Station, and gazed along its splendid length for the first
time, "_Weel, wi' a' their haverin', it's but half a street,
onyway!_"--which always reminded me of the Western farmer who came
from his native plains to the beautiful Berkshire hills. "I've always
heard o' this scenery," he said. "Blamed if I can find any scenery;
but if there was, nobody could see it, there's so much high ground in
the way!"

To think that not so much more than a hundred years ago Princes Street
was naught but a straight country road, the "Lang Dykes" and the "Lang
Gait," as it was called.

We looked down over the grassy chasm that separates the New from the
Old Town; looked our first on Arthur's Seat, that crouching lion of a
mountain; saw the Corstorphine hills, and Calton Heights, and
Salisbury Crags, and finally that stupendous bluff of rock that
culminates so majestically in Edinburgh Castle. There is something
else which, like Susanna Crum's name, is absolutely and ideally right!
Stev