Of carven brows, and splendor of great throat
Swayed lily-wise.”
Welcome apparitions of later days throng about us on the hill: Ramsay and his “Gentle Shepherd,” young Fergusson and his wild companions, Burns with his jovial cronies, the scholarly Jeffrey, the learned Hume, the inspired Sir Walter, the delightful revelers of the “Noctes Ambrosianæ,” the gentle Lady Nairne, the eager, brilliant Stevenson, and Dr. Brown with the faithful “Rab” and Ollivant with “Bob, Son of Battle.” The crisp sunshine lies golden on Princes Street and all her flowered terraces; it glints the grim redoubts of the Castle and lingers on the crooked gables of High Street. From the brown heather of the Pentlands to the distant sparkle of the Firth stretches a vigorous and comely land. What man so callous as to feel no joy in “Scotia’s Darling Seat”!
ANTWERP
2 P.M. TO 3 P.M.
A table in the lively little Café de la Terrasse, up on the broad stone promenoir overhanging the Antwerp docks, is one place in a thousand for the man who is inclined toward any such unusual combination as a maximum of twentieth-century business activity in a setting of the Middle Ages. He is fortunate in locality and happy in surroundings. A Parisian waiter removes the remains of his light luncheon of a salad of Belgian greens fresh this morning from a trim truck garden beyond the ramparts, refills the thin tumbler to the taste of the guest with foaming local Orge or light Brussels Faro or the bitter product of Ghent or the flat, insipid stuff they boast about at Louvain, and supplies a light for an excellent cigar made here in Antwerp of the best growth of Havana. Supposing it to be two o’clock of the usual mottled, doubtful afternoon,—for Antwerp’s weather, like Antwerp’s history, is mingled sunshine and shadows,—the loiterer may look out at his ease on a notable and fascinating panorama. Beneath him and to either side extend miles of massive docks of ponderous masonry, upon and about which swarms an ant-like multitude of nimble and active longshoremen plying a network of ropes and tackle, and directing the labors of vast, writhing derricks that toil like a mechanical Israel in bondage. Snuggling close to the grim granite walls are merchant mammoths from the ends of the earth, and into these, with the ease of a man stooping for a pin, gigantic steel arms sweep tons of casks and bales that they have lightly plucked out of long wharf trains lying alongside. There is a prodigious bustling of porters in long blue blouses, shouts and cries from the riverful of shipping, trampling of thousands of hobnailed shoes, and an incessant clatter of the wooden sabots of little Antwerp boys in peaked caps and baggy blue trousers and of little Antwerp girls in bright skirts and curious white headdress.
This sort of thing is proceeding for miles up and down the river front, and all through the intricate series of locks and bassins and canals that quadruple the wharfage of this rejuvenated old Flemish city. They are receiving whole argosies of raw material in the shape of hides, tobacco, and textiles, and are sending away fortunes in cut diamonds, delicate laces, linens, beer, sugar, and innumerable clever products of human hands from fragile glass to ponderous machinery. And they do it with more ease and, it seems necessary to add, with less profanity than any other port of Europe. What, then, could have possessed the genial Eugene Field to pass along that ancient slander on the excellent burghers of Flanders?
“At any rate, as I grieve to state,
Since these soldiers vented their danders,