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.