By this Scotsman I had a window opened into the Caledonian mind in maturity. Through him I realized something, not only of its rugged strength, its sanity, and its keen penetration, but I gained some notion also of the Scottish philosophy of common sense, which so long dominated colonial America and especially Princeton--the mother of statesmen and presidents, over which McCosh presided in my earlier days. It was this Caledonia of mind, made by the deposits of human thought through many ages and experiences, which seemed and yet appears to me as an eternal Scotland, which, despite change of fashions, of wars and calamities, shall never pass away. So I must confess to the spell of invisible Scotland, as well as to the fascination of the storm-swept peninsula of heaths and rugged hills. Besides boyhood’s companions of Scottish blood and descent, there were odd characters in the Pennsylvania regiment in which I served as flag corporal. My comrades under the Stars and Stripes came from various shires of Caledonia. Then, too, besides the bonnie maidens, like those Burns and Ramsay talked with, whose ancestry I knew, because I was often in their homes and met their parents and their kinsmen, there was the glamour of the dramatic poet’s creation. Immediately in front of my father’s home, in Philadelphia, was the famous Walnut Street Theatre, where that mighty figure in histrionic art, Edwin Forrest, was often seen. The tragedy of “Macbeth,” which I have seen rendered more times by famous actors than I have seen any other of Shakespeare’s creations, gave a background, which built in my imagination a picture of Scotland that had in it the depths of eternal time. The land and people had thus a perspective of history such as nothing else could suggest, even though I knew enough of the background of actual record to realize that Shakespeare’s chronology often passed the limits of Usher. So with boyhood’s memories and the reading of poets and romancers, with the more or less undefined horizons of picture, painting, book, and the drama, reinforced by what a college student might be supposed to have absorbed, I was ready for wondrous revelations when, with Quandril, my eldest sister, I embarked in the Scottish Anchor Line steamer Europa, Captain Macdonald, master, on the 26th of June, 1869. It was after graduation and at the end of the month of roses. We were bound for the land of Macbeth, Bruce, Wallace, Scott, and Burns. CHAPTER II THE OUTPOST ISLES