Two women, one well past middle age and the other just turned seventeen, walked along Princes Street in Edinburgh one morning, taking in deep breaths of the warm heather-scented breeze from the inland hills.
Perhaps they were exiles, restored to their native land after long wanderings in distant countries. Who could tell? At least a passer-by might have thought as much from the expressions of intense pleasure that animated their two faces. And, as if it were not enough to be treading the soil trod by one’s ancestors, there came to them the sound of a bagpipe (bagpipes are not so plentiful in Edinburgh as of yore), actually playing their own stirring ancestral chant:
“The Campbells are coming,
Oh, ho! Oh, ho!”
“Well of all the strange coincidences, my dear Wilhelmina,” exclaimed the elder of the two women, none other than Miss Helen Eustace Campbell.
“Isn’t it, cousin?” cried Billie, her soul fired with the martial strains of her ancestors.
But stranger than the coincidence of the bagpipe was the condition of the weather. It was a bright and beautiful day!
“When I was here more than thirty years ago it rained perpetually,” remarked Miss Campbell. “As much as I loved Edinburgh and valued its associations with former generations of my family, I will admit to you privately, my dear, that I was glad to leave.”
There was a subdued excitement in Miss Campbell’s voice, but Billie did not notice it. She smiled dreamily.
“I think I could love it even in rainy weather,” she said. “It is the most picturesque and beautiful city I was ever in.”
She raised her eyes with worshipful reverence to Edinburgh Castle, old and gray, perched on the summit of a bold rock in the distance, like an ancient sentinel always on duty.