INDEX 287 ILLUSTRATIONS ST. MARTIN’S CROSS AT IONA _Frontispiece_ EDINBURGH CITY AND CASTLE 28 DRYBURGH ABBEY 44 ABBOTSFORD 62 THE MONASTERY, DUNFERMLINE ABBEY 70 THE VALLEY OF THE TAY 84 A TYPICAL SCOTTISH STREET: HIGH STREET, DUMFRIES 94 STIRLING CASTLE, FROM THE KING’S KNOT 100 THE KINGS’ GRAVES, IONA 128 THE CAIRN AT CULLODEN 148 THE SCOTCH BRIGADE MEMORIAL 174 INTERIOR OF COTTAGE, NORTHEAST COAST 194 THE HARBOR OF KIRKWALL, ORKNEY ISLANDS 202 THE TROSSACHS AND LOCH ACHRAY 216 THE TAM O’ SHANTER INN, AYR 226 THE EDINBURGH CONFERENCE OF MISSIONS 268 BONNIE SCOTLAND CHAPTER I THE SPELL OF THE INVISIBLE As with so many of my countrymen, the dream floated before the vision dawned. The American who for the first time opens his eyes in Europe is like the newborn babe, whose sight is not yet focused. He sees double. There is continually before him the Old World of his fancy and the Europe of reality. War begins, as in heaven, between the angels--of memory and of hope. The front and the rear of his brain are in conflict. While the glamour of that initial glimpse, that never-recurring moment of first surprise, is before him, he perforce compares and contrasts the ideal and the reality, even to his bewilderment and confusion. Only gradually do the two beholdings coalesce. Yet even during the dissolving pictures of imagination and optical demonstration, that which is present and tangible wins a glory from what is past and unseen. From childhood there was always a Scotland which, like Wordsworth’s “light that never was, on sea or land,” lay in my mind as “the consecration and the poet’s dream,” of purple heather, crimson-tipped daisies, fair lasses, and brave lads. It rose out of such rainbow tints of imagination and out of such mists of fancy as were wont to gather, after reading the poets and romancers who have made Scotland a magnet to travellers the world over. This far-off region, of kilts and claymores, first sprang out of the stories of friends and companions. Our schoolmates, whether born on the moor or sprung from Scottish parents in America, inherited the love of their fond forebears and kinsmen, who sincerely believed that, of all lands on this globe, Bonnie Scotland was the fairest.