Leaving this mass of stone behind us, we pass on to the upland moors, and after three or four miles see the two bold hills, the King’s Seat and Dunsinane. As we proceed, we find several old stones which, not being rolling, have gathered on their faces a rich crop of the moss of legend. The southern face of Dunsinane Hill is sheer and steep, but the view from the top is magnificent. Here on the summit we can barely trace the foundations of the second castle of Macbeth, which he built after leaving Glamis and to which he retired. Here he lived in the hope of finding security, the witches having predicted that he would never be conquered until “Birnam wood came to Dunsinane.” Thinking to make assurance doubly sure, he compelled the nobles and their retainers to build new fortifications for him. Men and oxen were so roughly impressed in the work that he made enemies of old friends and rupture soon occurred between him and Macduff. After his father’s murder, Malcolm fled to England, whence a powerful army was sent to invade Scotland. The Scots joined the standard of the young prince and the army marched northward unopposed and encamped twelve miles away, at Birnam, under the shelter of a forest, which then covered the hill, but is now no more. The soldiers, each one having cut down a branch of a tree,--probably not with any knowledge of the witch’s prophecy, but to conceal their numbers,--made a moving mass of green. Macbeth, looking out from the battlements of his castle, beheld what seemed to him a vast forest in motion across the plain to overwhelm him with destruction. Whatever was really true in the matter, tradition has adopted the element of poetical justice so often illustrated by the great Shakespeare, though some reports are that Macbeth escaped from two battles with his life and kept up a guerilla warfare in the north, until killed in a conflict in Aberdeenshire. In another Scottish town, we were shown a school which stands on the site of the old castle of the Macduffs, the Thanes or Earls of Fife. [Illustration: A TYPICAL SCOTTISH STREET: HIGH STREET, DUMFRIES] The touch of genius has made the name of Macbeth immortal. He is known wherever the English language is read or spoken. How different is the fate of those humbler folk, who lie in the ooze of the past, unrecalled by poet or dramatist! In not a few places in Scotland, one meets the pathetic sight of old tombs and graveyards that are, in some instances, hardly visible for the greenery that covers them. Here “the rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep,” but even the hamlet is gone, the church is in ruins, and the descendants of those who once lived and loved and died are now on various continents. They have found other homes, and most of them, children of the new lands, only vaguely remember, or most probably are ignorant of, the place in which their forefathers dwelt and whence their parents or grandparents came.