The last, or ninth, Earl of Elgin was Viceroy of India from 1894 to 1899, and in 1905–8 was Secretary of State for the Colonies in the Cabinet of Sir H. Campbell-Bannerman, where he was somewhat overshadowed by his brilliant under-secretary, Winston Churchill, of whom we heard in 1916, in a soldier’s uniform. Elgin retired from the Cabinet when Mr. Asquith became Prime Minister.
Elgin, like most other similarly vertebrated Scottish towns, consists of a backbone, the High Street, from which numerous ribs or alleys diverge. This principal highway contains the ancient buildings and extends about a mile from east to west, though its uniformity is broken by the parish church, which obtrudes into the causeway. The town has long been famous for its schools, while of all the Scottish cathedrals, except that in Glasgow, this at Elgin is the most magnificent and certainly the most ornate. One of the most imposing ruins in the kingdom, it has great interest for the architect. It was founded in 1224, during the reign of Alexander II, who also gave the town its charter. “Proud” Edward I stayed at the castle twice, and the building was destroyed immediately after national independence had been reasserted at Bannockburn, in order that the memory of his visits might be blotted out. The hill on which the castle stood was re-named the “Lady Hill.” On the scanty ruins of the castle now stands a fluted column surmounted by a statue of the fifth Duke of Gordon.
Elgin has had a surfeit of history, with the unhappiness therefrom accruing. Ravaged, burned, plundered, and rebuilt, the place survived all degrees of devastation, to settle down into a sleepy cathedral town for generations, until touched by the spirit of the nineteenth century which has swept away much of its picturesqueness. So often had it been fired and robbed that when, in 1402, Alexander, Lord of the Isles, burned the town, he, the canny Scot, for a consideration, spared the cathedral. The Elginers, acting on the principle of “small favors thankfully received,” erected the “Little Cross”—so named to distinguish it from the “Muckle,” or “Market Cross,” which was restored in 1888.
In the vestibule connecting the chapter house with the choir, a poor, half-crazy creature, a soldier’s widow, named Marjorie Anderson, took up her quarters in 1748. She made her infant’s cradle of the stone basin or niche, in which the priest formerly washed the chalice after administering communion; that is, in the “piscina,”—named after the ancient fishpond attached to a Roman villa,—and she lived on charity. In time, her baby boy, grown to manhood, joined the army, and went to India. He rose to be major-general and amassed a fortune, amounting to what would now be a half-million dollars, and with this he endowed the Elgin Institution, which is called after its benefactor. The Anderson Institution for the Education of Youth and the support of Old Age in Elgin has also a romantic story of origins.
Nothing could kill Elgin. It might well take for its motto, “iterum,”—again. The “Garden of Scotland,” with its fine climate, cheap living, and good schools, rose into prosperity, especially since many of her former sons have been generous to their mother. In 1903, Mr. G. A. Cooper presented his native town with a public park of forty-two acres containing lakes, which represent, on a miniature scale, the British Isles. The public library occupies what was once the mansion of the Grant family.
There is a church at Birnie, not far away to the southwest, built in 1150, which is believed to be the oldest house of public worship still in use in Scotland. Here is preserved an old Celtic altar bell of hammered iron. Such is the odor of sanctity of this ancient edifice that there is a local saying that “To be thrice prayed for in the kirk of Birnie will either mend or end you.”
CHAPTER XIX
THE ORKNEYS AND THE SHETLANDS
In the days of the great world-war of 1914–16, the Orkneys rose into fresh notice, especially because here the British cruisers, that had intercepted the neutral steamers to Holland, Scandinavia, and Denmark, took their semi-prizes and detained mails and passengers, causing much exasperation. Here, too, was the western terminal of the line of blockade, with ships and steel netting, by which passage into Germany was made nearly impossible. During this period many Americans were involuntary and not over-happy visitors to these islands, which to them were, literally, the Bleak House of the British Empire.
“Orcades” was the name the Romans gave to this northern extremity of their world. Their existence had been unknown, nor was it suspected that Britain was an island, until the time of Agricola in A.D. 78. Then the fleet of triremes ploughed the waves, unveiling the contour of the country, centuries later called Scotland.
