but their hearts are in
the right place; and they will only bark and sprawl about you on the
grass, unmindful of their master's excitations.

Kirk Yetton forms the north-eastern angle of the range; thence, the
Pentlands trend off to south and west. From the summit you look over a
great expanse of champaign sloping to the sea and behold a large variety
of distant hills. There are the hills of Fife, the hills of Peebles, the
Lammermoors, and the Ochils, more or less mountainous in outline, more
or less blue with distance. Of the Pentlands themselves, you see a field
of wild heathery peaks with a pond gleaming in the midst; and to that
side the view is as desolate as if you were looking into Galloway or
Applecross. To turn to the other, is like a piece of travel. Far out in
the lowlands Edinburgh shows herself, making a great smoke on clear
days and spreading her suburbs about her for miles; the Castle rises
darkly in the midst; and close by, Arthur's Seat makes a bold figure in
the landscape. All around, cultivated fields, and woods, and smoking
villages, and white country roads, diversify the uneven surface of the
land. Trains crawl slowly abroad upon the railway lines; little ships
are tacking in the Firth; the shadow of a mountainous cloud, as large as
a parish, travels before the wind; the wind itself ruffles the wood and
standing corn, and sends pulses of varying colour across the landscape.
So you sit, like Jupiter on Olympus, and look down from afar upon men's
life. The city is as silent as a city of the dead: from all its humming
thoroughfares, not a voice, not a footfall, reaches you upon the hill.
The sea surf, the cries of ploughmen, the streams and the mill-wheels,
the birds and the wind, keep up an animated concert through the plain;
from farm to farm, dogs and crowing cocks contend together in defiance;
and yet from this Olympian station, except for the whispering rumour of
a train, the world has fallen into a dead silence and the business of
town and country grown voiceless in your ears. A crying hill-bird, the
bleat of a sheep, a wind singing in the dry grass, seem not so much to
interrupt, as to accompany, the stillness; but to the spiritual ear, the
whole scene makes a music at once human and rural, and discourses
pleasant reflections on the destiny of man. The spiry habitable city,
ships, the divided fields, and browsing herds, and the straight
highways, tell visibly of man's active and comfortable ways;