"The raven himself is hoarse
That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan
Under my battlements."
Cawdor Castle
There are iron girded doors and secret apartments; not for Macbeth, but for Lovat. This Lord of the Last Rising lived secretly for many months in Cawdor while the Prince was moving restlessly to and fro in the Islands. But the Prince was only twenty-five, and Lord Lovat was over eighty. I like to think he was as young and keen to adventure as the Prince. And I do not like to think of that beheading in the Tower—
"I must become a borrower of the night."
Inverness
The four chief cities of Scotland are arranged like a diamond for excursion and for history. Always Scotland, unlike Gaul, has been divided into four parts. Places of pilgrimage were Scone, Dundee, Paisley, Melrose. Places for the quartering of Montrose were Glasgow, Perth, Aberdeen, Stirling. And now four places are rivals; in trade somewhat, but Glasgow leads in beauty, but Edinburgh, after all, is unique in dignity, but Aberdeen is unbending; in the picturesque there remains Inverness.
The city deserves its honours. (William Black has painted it in "Wild Eelin.") It has a life of its own. For when I first came to Inverness there was a cattle fair on, and sheep from all over the kingdom, from Shropshire and from the Cheviots, came to be judged in Inverness; and men came with them who looked very modern and capable and worldly and commercial. It was all like a county fair of Iowa, only more dignified, with no touch of sideshow. And, of course, there is the Highland gathering in September, which has become too much like the sideshow, too much a show, to attract the groundlings, and not a gathering of the clans. Still—if one must take Scotland in a gulp—this is a very good chance at Highland colour and sound and remnants of valour.
The town itself is full of pictures. It does not announce itself. There is a close-built part, looking like a French provincial town, with gabled houses, and down on the banks of the Ness the women spread their clothes to dry as they do on a French river bank. There is a new cathedral, very new, with an angel at the font we remembered William Winter had liked, so we paid it respectful attention. There is a park on the Ness to the west, where many islands and many bridges form a spot of beauty.
And there is Tomnahurich—The Hill of the Fairies—a sudden steep hill-mound, where Inverness carries its dead—like the Indians who carried them to Indian mounds high above the rivers of the American West. The dark yews make it even more solemn; one wonders if the fairies dare play in these shades. But it is a sweetly solemn place, and we decided to care not what Invernessians lay buried here if we might sit on its convenient park benches and look at far rolling Scotland and think of fairies and of Thomas the Rimer, who, it seems, came hither all the way from Ercildoune from Melrose to heap this mound for his burial! The errant Scots!