When the blue bonnets came over the border.”
The afternoon sun rests brightly on the pretty glen in the foreground where lie the dismal, bat-flown ruins of Rosslyn Castle, loopholed for archers and shadowed in ancient yews that have overhung the Esk for a thousand years, and on the delicate chapel of stone-lace where the barons of Rosslyn await the Judgment in full armor with finger-tips joined in prayer. And there, too, are the cool, dark thickets of Hawthornden, recalling the ever-popular
“Gang down the burn, Davy Love,
And I will follow thee.”
One cannot forbear a smile as he surveys the noble bridge that spans the Forth and recalls the insistent pride of Edinburgh in the same. Here is an achievement over which all visitors are expected to exclaim in amazement—and engineers, I presume, invariably do. On this point your Edinburgh man is immovable. He scorns to elaborate and he will not descend to eulogy. He merely indicates it with a reverent inclination of the head, and turns and looks you in the eye; you are supposed to do the rest. Personally, while I give the great structure its dues, which are many, I like what flows under it more.
And there is one thing about the Forth that Edinburgh people never forget, nor do the visitors who find it out: “Caller herrin’!” It must have taxed the resources of even such a genius as Lady Nairne, whose home one may see if he looks beyond Holyrood to the villas of Duddingston, to have written two such dissimilar songs as the heart-melting “Land o’ the Leal” and the cheery “Caller Herrin’.” There’s the king of all marketing songs. It really compels one to think with despair of what a dreary mockery life would be were this, of all harvests, to fail. For love of that song I could defend the Forth herring against all competitors whatsoever. Loch Fyne herring? Fair fish, yes; but really, now, you would hardly say they have that racy flavor we get in the Forth article. Caller salmon? Oh, pshaw, you are from Glasgow; you have been swearing by caller salmon for five hundred years; have it on your coat of arms; used to draw it on legal papers as other people do seals;—but, honestly, have you ever seen a salmon in the Clyde, anywhere near Glasgow, in all your life? And if you did, would you eat it? Certainly not! So “give over,” as they say in England. Certainly there never was such pathos and unction devoted to just such a subject. And the music, too! How it compels you with its appealing monotones and rebukes you with the brave huckster cries on high F! So when you are passing near Waverley Market and encounter one of the picturesque Scandinavian fishwives, who has trudged in with her “woven willow” from her little stone house at Newhaven with the patched roof and quaint fore-stairs, unless you are willing to buy a herring then and there and carry it around in your pocket, run for your life before she starts singing:—
“When ye were sleeping on your pillows,
Dreamt ye aught o’ our puir fellows,
Darkling as they face the billows,
A’ to fill our woven willows!