By 1610 the mounted police had done their work so well that the borders were reported, by King James’s commissioners, to be as peaceable and quiet as any part of any civil kingdom in Christendom. In a word, the pioneers of civilization, on either side of the frontier, were like men who blast the rocks, fill up the swamps, and grade the prairies and canyons, so that we can sleep in the berths and eat in the dining-cars of the “Flying Scotchman” or the “Overland Limited.” Much of the waste land, long ago reclaimed, is now covered with the gardens, fertile fields, and fair homes of ladies, gentlemen, and Christians. After the enormous mineral wealth of this region had been exploited, moss troopers and cattle-thieves were as much out of place as are the cowboys--except on the stage, which is an indestructible museum of antiquities. Certainly, for the literary enjoyment of succeeding centuries, it was a good thing that the memorials of this period of turbulence were ultimately transformed, by the relieved people, into material for legend and song; yes, even so that Scott could build Abbotsford without moat or drawbridge. The poetry of the situation is vastly more enjoyable to-day than was the prose of reality during several centuries. In like manner, we, who, in our upholstered chairs, with our feet against the fender of the winter fire-grate, delight in and admire the red Iroquois in Cooper’s novels, necessarily take a different view of the whole Indian “problem” than could our ancestors, so many of whose scalps adorned the walls of the Long House of the Forest Republic. In our annals the name of General John Sullivan as one who avenged the destruction of the Scotch settlements on the Susquehanna, and opened for our fathers the westward paths of civilization, must go down to history with the same halo of fame as that which surrounds Sir William Cranstoun and his little company of moss troopers of the new sort. Moreover, when the white man is no longer busy in depositing lead inside the redskin’s cuticle, while the copper-colored savage ceases to raise the hair of his affectionate white brother, there is a better common understanding of one another’s psychology, besides more room for mutual appreciation. Verily, history fills with its oil the fragrant lamp of literature that illuminates while it charms. CHAPTER VII THE LAY OF THE LAND: DUNFERMLINE