any ways lead out of Perth, but best of these is the foot-path way, picked up anywhere in the Highlands. By rail the road leads down to the sea, past Glamis Castle, built in 1500, where the room is shown in which Duncan was murdered in 1000, although Shakespeare says it was at Inverness; and to Kirriemuir, if one would match the "Bonnie Brier Bush" with "The Window in Thrums." Or by rail the road leads to the lakes of the West, and to the Highlands of the North.
GLAMIS CASTLE.
For one short space I took it northward to the Pass of Killiecrankie, almost in fear, as a regiment of English mercenaries is said to have been a-feared in the Forty Five, three-quarters of a century after Killiecrankie. For here in a last splendid moment, Graham of Claverhouse, Viscount of Dundee, and sometime Bonnie Dundee, was killed, the battle having gone gloriously his way, for the glorious cause of Stewart and mon droit—some say by a silver bullet, the devil having charmed the leaden bullets that were showered against his magic life; those who say it are Whigs.
Always called Bonnie Dundee by those of us who care for romance. To quote from Samuel Crothers, "And you say they are the same? I cannot make them seem the same. To me there are two of them: Graham of Claverhouse, whom I hate, and the Bonnie Dundee, whom I love. If it's all the same to you, I think I shall keep them separate, and go on loving and hating as aforetime."
The Pass is lovely enough, on a summer morning, with the sun shining fair on the Highlands, the blue hills misty in the distance, the trees thick green on both sides the bending Garry, and not a living thing in view, nothing which belongs to the Duke of Atholl who owns everything hereabout, except the air and the beauty and the memory, which I packed in my Pilgrim's Wallet.
Because the Duke owns the cathedral I did not claim any memory beside the dust of Bonnie Dundee—
"Fling open the Westport and let me gae free."
And now, to a certain defeat which I suffered near the Pass of Killiecrankie, when I "cam by Athole." I was without a philabeg. If I had had it—it sounds so enhearteningly like usquebaugh—I think my courage would have been great enough to do the thing I had crossed over seas to do—to walk from Blair Athole through Glen Tilt and between the great lift of the Cairngorms, to Braemar. I had felt that I owed it to Scottish ancestors and to those who had lost in the Risings.