I knew better, but it wuz a grand and sweepin’ view as I ever see, or ever expect to see. All Scotland lay spread out before us, some as our old map would if it wuz spread on the kitchen floor, and I looked down on it from the top of the kitchen table.
We see the room here where poor Mary, Queen of Scots, gave birth to a prince, James VI., afterwards James 1st of England. What she went through in this room! For when her baby wuz only eight days old it wuz let down in a basket from the cliff. Jest think on’t, sech a little baby let down four hundred feet; but it wuz to save his life, and she stood it.
Here we see the crown that they said rested on the head of Robert Bruce. And we see the place where so many, so many politicians had their heads cut off.
I didn’t like to hear sech talk, and I showed that I didn’t by my mean. But I proposed that we should jine Martin. He wuz a-settin’ down in front of them rampants a-addin’ up a row of figgers in a account book.
He said that it wuz some home business that had to be attended to. As he put the book back in his pocket, and proposed that we should start for somewhere else, I sez, “The view is enchantin’ from here, hain’t it, Martin?”
“Yes,” sez he in a absent-minded way, without turnin’ his head—
“Yes; there! I forgot to add that last five thousand dollars to the balance,” and he wrote it down as we walked onwards.
But my remark wuz evidently a-hangin’ round in some by-place in his mind, for he presently remarked as he went down the path—
“Yes, as you say, the view is perfectly enchanting.”
And he gazed dreamily at the rocks that riz up before us and shet out every mite of view from that place.