Across the Plains, with Other Memories and EssaysStevenson, Robert Louis
General
Across the Plains, with Other Memories and Essays
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Essays; Monterey (Calif.) -- Description and travel; West (U.S.) -- Description and travel
and cages of song-birds in the cabin windows, and for one particular
Dutch skipper who would sit all day in slippers on the break of the poop,
smoking a long German pipe; Wemyss (pronounce Weems) with its bat-haunted
caves, where the Chevalier Johnstone, on his flight from Culloden, passed
a night of superstitious terrors; Leven, a bald, quite modern place,
sacred to summer visitors, whence there has gone but yesterday the tall
figure and the white locks of the last Englishman in Delhi, my uncle Dr.
Balfour, who was still walking his hospital rounds, while the troopers
from Meerut clattered and cried “Deen Deen” along the streets of the
imperial city, and Willoughby mustered his handful of heroes at the
magazine, and the nameless brave one in the telegraph office was perhaps
already fingering his last despatch; and just a little beyond Leven,
Largo Law and the smoke of Largo town mounting about its feet, the town
of Alexander Selkirk, better known under the name of Robinson Crusoe. So
on, the list might be pursued (only for private reasons, which the reader
will shortly have an opportunity to guess) by St. Monance, and
Pittenweem, and the two Anstruthers, and Cellardyke, and Crail, where
Primate Sharpe was once a humble and innocent country minister: on to the
heel of the land, to Fife Ness, overlooked by a sea-wood of matted elders
and the quaint old mansion of Balcomie, itself overlooking but the breach
or the quiescence of the deep—the Carr Rock beacon rising close in front,
and as night draws in, the star of the Inchcape reef springing up on the
one hand, and the star of the May Island on the other, and farther off
yet a third and a greater on the craggy foreland of St. Abb’s. And but a
little way round the corner of the land, imminent itself above the sea,
stands the gem of the province and the light of mediæval Scotland, St.
Andrews, where the great Cardinal Beaton held garrison against the world,
and the second of the name and title perished (as you may read in Knox’s
jeering narrative) under the knives of true-blue Protestants, and to this
day (after so many centuries) the current voice of the professor is not
hushed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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