On the contrary, the Highlander is rather reserved, self-restrained, not merry or witty, but often sullen and morose. Yet he is courteous, dutiful, persevering, faithful as an ally and brave as a foe. Surely the differing environments explain, to a large extent, this differentiation between two peoples of the same original stock. The Highlander has lived in a glen, narrow, rocky, separated from his neighbors in the next glen by high and rugged hills. On a niggardly soil, stony and wet, and in a cold and uncertain climate, he has battled for ages with the elements, facing Nature in her wilder moods and has not played a winning game. Often he is near starvation, for on his little field much rain and little sunshine falls. His seed often rots in the soggy soil. The noise of storm and tempest, of whirlwind and swollen waters, is ever in his hearing. He cannot be mirthful and light-hearted like the Celt, but is often stolidly obstinate; or, it may be, undauntedly persevering. No one who has heard his music but has noted that melancholy which breathes like an undertone throughout his songs and bagpipe melodies, even when they cheer and inspire to duty. Nevertheless, the proud Scot will boast of his land so full of barren mountains. “Iron them all out flat, and Scotland will be found to be as large as England,” was the assertion, with triumphant air, of a native who loved the heather. CHAPTER XXI ROBERT BURNS AND HIS TEACHERS One must not come to Scotland without seeing Ayr, the native village of Burns, any more than go to Tokio and not get a glimpse of the Mikado. It is said that more tourists hailing from America visit annually the village in which Robert Burns first saw the light than are seen at Stratford. This may mean that there are probably more prosperous and cultured descendants of Scotsmen in America than there are of ancestral English folk. In addition to the throng from trans-Atlantic lands must be counted a goodly company of passionate pilgrims from all parts of the British Empire. Theodore Cuyler tells us, in his “Recollections,” how Carlyle, when a boy, visited the grave of the poet, his feelings allowing him to say only, but over and over again, “Rabbie Burns, Rabbie Burns.” The cottage in which the poet was born is probably in a much more substantial condition to-day than in Burns’s infancy. When the poet’s father took hold of the structure, it was a “clay bigging,” which the parent rebuilt with his own hands. On the night of Robert’s birth, a storm came on and part of the cottage fell in, so that the mother with the baby had to fly for shelter to the house of a neighbor until the house was repaired.