In another place I saw an artificial ruin, constructed about a century ago, but now so completely overgrown with ivy that ages seemed to have passed over it, so that one might imagine that romance must linger in its stones. When first seeing this hoary pile, I was tempted to unfold the pinions of fancy and imagination for a long flight; when, suddenly, I remembered the poem by Eugene Field. He tells us, in his mellifluous verse, how when in Amsterdam of the Netherlands, he saw an imposing piece of furniture which fired his imagination. It was a bedstead, of remarkably feudalistic and baronial suggestion. Field pictured to himself the ancient castle in which that bedstead, “seat of rapture, seat of pain,” had stood. He saw in perspective of fancy the richly robed lords and ladies, that had sought repose upon it. The dreams that they dreamed, in the days of falconry and cavalcades, of tournaments and cloth of gold, must have been as brilliant as his own. Yet, before paying the purchase price, the western poet glanced at the back of the headboard and read the words, “Made in Grand Rapids, Michigan.” “One touch of nature,” etc. CHAPTER IX THE GLAMOUR OF MACBETH What a delightful thing it is to be first enthralled with a drama, romance, or poem, and then to enjoy a topographical appendix, in the form of a ramble over the ground--where it never happened! In Scotland there was once a Macbeth MacFinleigh, King of Scotland for seventeen years, stout fighter, patron of the Culdees, and pilgrim to Rome. He appears to have had all the accomplishments of royalty, piety, belligerency, and whatever seemed necessary for an eleventh-century man in power. In a word, he was in harmony with his age and environment and did what was expected of him. Not much is known of this Macbeth, but details of reality are never necessary to literary immortality. Did not our own Irving, out of three lines and a half of record, which concerned only one passing incident, construct the colossal figure of Anthony van Corlear, the trumpeter? And are not Anthony’s Nose, and Spuyten Duyvil, on the Hudson, monumental evidences, in rock and water, of the personality of the handsome fellow who broke the hearts of both Dutch and Yankee maidens?