There is no end of castles and of historic memories lying like pebbles upon the seashore of the Firth. Pick up any sea shell—I do not remember seeing any, so combed have these beaches been from the memory of man—and it will whisper a tale in your ear.
But there is for me but one pilgrimage to be made in Fifeshire, to Kirkcaldy; to the place, not of Ravenscraig Castle, nor because Adam Smith and political economy were here born twins, nor because Carlyle taught here for two years, nor because Edward Irving preached here; their dwellings and schools and graves can be seen. But because Marjorie Fleming was born here, passed to and fro, from Granton to Burntisland, in those brief beautiful nine years that were granted to her, and to us, and lies buried in the old kirkyard of Abbotshall.
Perhaps you do not know Marjorie. She was the friend, the intimate friend of Sir Walter Scott. And I can but think how large and void the world was a century ago, in that Charles Lamb was living in London when Marjorie was living in Kirkcaldy, and was dreaming of his "Dream Children," when he might have known this most precious child, fit to be the friend of Lamb as she was of Sir Walter.
Other men who have loved her with a tenderness which can belong but to the living child, immortally living, are Dr. John Brown who wrote the wonder book about her fifty years ago, through which most of us have claimed Marjorie as our own, and Mark Twain, who only a month before he died—and joined her—wrote as tenderly and whimsically of her as he ever wrote of any child or any maid. Among such august company we almost hesitate to enter, but surely at this distance of time we may lay our love beside that of the great men who found Pet Marjorie one of the most precious human treasures the world has ever held.
She was but a little girl, and only nine years all told, when the last day came to her a hundred and more years ago, December 19, 1811. The first six years she lived in Kirkcaldy, "my native town which though dirty is clene in the country," Marjorie wrote this from Edinburgh a little patronizingly, and Marjorie was never strong on spelling. The next three years she lived with her aunt in the Scottish capital, where she wrote those journals and letters which have kept her memory warm to this day. In July of 1811 she returned to the town by the North Sea, and in December she was gone.
In the morning of the day on which I made my pilgrimage I went up to the Parliament buildings in the Old Town, looked them about, saw the lawyers pacing to and fro, as Stevenson had paced, but not for long—the absurdity of it!—and then down the hill in the shadow of three men.
"One November afternoon in 1810"—(the year in which the "Lady of the Lake" was published) "three men, evidently lawyers, might have been seen escaping like school boys from the Parliament House, and speeding arm in arm down Bank Street and the Mound, in the teeth of a surly blast of sleet." They were Lord Erskine, William Clerk—and the third we all know; what service of romance has he not performed for us! As the snow blattered in his face he muttered, "how it raves and drifts! On-ding o' snaw—aye, that's the word, on-ding." And so he approached his own door, Castle Street, No. 39. There, over the door, looking forth on the world, is his face to-day, looking up Young Street.
Then, as he grew restless and would awa, I followed him through Young Street up to No. 1, North Charlotte Street. It is a substantial building, still of dignified and fair estate; neighbourhoods are not transformed in a Scots century as they are in America. But it carries no tablet to tell the world that here Marjorie lived. It was here that at the age of six she wrote her first letter to Isa Keith. It was here that Marjorie saw "regency bonnets" and with eyes of envy; as indeed she envied and desired with the passionate depths of her nature all lovely and strange things. Here she read the Newgate calendar, and found it a fascinating affair—Marjorie less than nine! And here that Isabel Keith, her adored cousin, would not permit the little bookworm to read much of lovers or to talk of them. Marjorie says very gravely, "a great many authors have expressed themselves too sentimentally," but Isa was never able quite to cure Marjorie of her interest in love.
That evening Sir Walter carried her, through the "on-ding o' snaw," in a shepherd's plaid, over to Castle Street. I walked through the narrow stone-lined thoroughfare on a hot July morning—and I could feel the cold and snow of that winter a century back, and see the strong, lame, great man, carrying the wee wifie in the neuk of his plaid, to the warm firelight of his castle. Marjorie and he would romp there the evening long. She would hear him say his lessons, "Ziccoty, diccoty, dock," or "Wonery, twoery, tickery, seven," while Marjorie "grew quite bitter in her displeasure at his ill behaviour and stupidness."
Then they would read ballads together; and then "he would take her on his knee, and make her repeat Constance's speeches in King John till he swayed to and fro sobbing his fill. Fancy the gifted little creature, like one possessed, repeating—