There are other monuments, none so historic, so grandiose, so solemn. The friends of a gentleman who had died about mid-century record that he died "at Plean Junction." Somehow it seemed very uncertain, ambiguous, capable of mistake, to die at a Junction out of which must run different ways.
And one man, buried here, was brought all the way, as the tombstone publishes, from "St. Peter, Minnesota." It's a historic town, to its own people. But what a curious linking with this very old town. I thought of a man who had hurried away from Montana the winter before, because he wanted to "smell the heather once more before I die." And he had died in St. Paul, Minnesota, only a thousand miles on his way back to the heather.
Viewed from below, the castle is splendid. The road crosses the bridge, skirts the north side of the Rock, toward the King's Knot; a view-full walk, almost as good, almost, as Edinburgh from Princes Gardens; this green and pastoral, that multicoloured and urban. The whole situation is very similar, the long ridge of the town, the heaven-topping castle hill. Stirling is the Old Town of Edinburgh minus the New Town. And so we confess ourselves modern. Stirling is not so lovely; yet it is more truly, more purely Scottish. Edinburgh is a city of the world. Stirling is a town of Scotland.
CHAPTER XI
THE WEST COUNTRY
Glasgow
cannot think why, in a book to be called deliberately "The Spell of Scotland," there should be a chapter on Glasgow.
I remember that in his "Picturesque Notes," to the second edition Robert Louis Stevenson added a foot-note in rebuke to the Glaswegians who had taken to themselves much pleasure at the reservations of Stevenson's praise of Edinburgh—"But remember I have not yet written a book on Glasgow." He never did. And did any one ever write "Picturesque Notes on Glasgow"?