I remembered that Queen Mary had longed to be a man. When she had come into this North to punish Huntley, so the Scottish calendar states, "She repenteth of nothing, but when the lords and others came in the morning from the watch, that she was not a man to know what life it was to lie all night in the fields, or to walk upon the causeway with a jack and a knapschall (helmet), a Glasgow buckler, and a broadsword." Her father's errant soul was hers. And once she ventured it, but in fear of her life, when she fled from the wraith of Darnley, to the scandalizing of the mongers, "Her Majestie, in mennis claithes, buttit and spurrit, departed that samin nicht of Borthwick to Dunbar, quhairof no man knew saif my Lord Duke and sum of his servants, wha met Her Majestie a myll off Borthwick and conveyed her hieness to Dunbar."

GLEN TILT.

I added another Scottish defeat. For it was excessively warm that summer, and Scotland can be as warm and as dry as Kansas. It is thirty miles, the mountain way. There is no inn. There is possibility—there is danger—of losing the way. There are no wolves, I suppose, and certainly no Wolf of Badenoch. But there were the unknown terrors.

So we walked a certain stent into Glen Tilt, enough to know that it is wild, gloomy, one of the strangest wildest places, Ben-y-Gloe, the "Mountain of the Mist," rising out of the early morning mist, yet not so mysteriously or majestically as the Mountain Going to the Sun. But no valley in our Mountain West has ever seemed more empty. And I suppose since Pictish time this glen has been deserted. There were deer, red deer, that thought they were free, and who looked out of their coverts indifferently. We had not the heart to tell them that they belonged, body and soul, to the Duke of Atholl. After the Porteous riots, Queen Caroline, presiding in the place of George who was absent in his favourite Hanover, threatened "to turn Scotland into a hunting field." The Duke of Argyle thereupon hinted that he would have to "return to look after my hounds." Queen Caroline seems sovereign to-day. And especially on August eleventh, the day before St. Grouse Day, there is an ominous quiet.

So we returned by way of Coupar Angus—meekly remembering the proverb, "he that maun to Coupar, maun to Coupar." Here we changed cars, nearly losing the train, because we were so engrossed in watching the loading of the luggage, the Scotch porter cheering on his assistant, "we're twa strong men, haud awa, let's be canny." And in the great gold sunset that was like the glory of God upon the heavenly Highlands.

We came to Blairgowrie, where we heard in the twilight on the hills above the town a bird of magic such as I have never heard elsewhere. Was it a nightingale, or a night lark? It sang like these.

Next morning we took coach across these great hills, by way of Glenshee, a very lovely way of going, and not to be regretted, in its dashing splendour of a coach and six—except that it was not a thirty-mile walk. But it is to be historically remembered, because it is the way Mar's men came down to the Strath of Tay, and brought the Rising into the Lowlands. We would go to meet them.

It was a memorable day. Not even the Simplon pass taken on a June day when the road ran between fresh coach-out-topping walls of glittering snow can make one forget the road over the Spittal of Glenshee. There were impossibly purple mountains, indigo-deep, deeper purple than any hills I have ever seen, so does the ripened heather dye the distances more deeply. There were rocky glens, great loneliness, a mansion here and there only just on leaving Blairgowrie, Tullyveolan, of course; scarce a cottage even on the roadside; once a flock of sheep, near the Spittal, being worked by Scotch collies, with an uncanny, or, canny, second sense to get the master's direction. There was lunch at the Spittal, a one-time Hospice, like that on the Simplon. And I wondered if the song ran of this lovely little glen set in the midst of so much primeval world—