Occasionally one meets an old man or woman in the great cities, like Glasgow or Dundee, who will tell of the joys remembered or glories passed away, naming the village, perhaps in the glens or on the carses, which one cannot find on the map, or may discover only by consulting some old gazetteer in the libraries. To me, an American, these white-haired old folks I saluted on the moors and in the glens, recalled the words of our own Holmes, and especially that stanza which President Lincoln thought the most pathetic in the English language:-- “The mossy marbles rest On the lips that he has prest In their bloom; And the names he loved to hear Have been carved for many a year On the tomb.” Yet who--unless a Mark Twain, who could drop a tear over Father Adam’s grave--will weep over the long departed Picts? More often, while reading the books, rather than when rambling among the country folk in Scotland, do we hear of these shadowy figures, who live in ethnology rather than in local tradition. For example, what became of the “Picts,” who figure so largely in ancient writings, before Pictland became Scotland? Old legends represent King Kenneth II, who died in 995, as having “exterminated” the Picts, who had slain his father. Thus these aborigines sank, in popular tradition, to mere mythology. A Pict now seems but as a nixie, a brownie, or some sort of mythical, even fairy folk, hardly human, to whom great feats, including even the building of Glasgow Cathedral, are attributed. In 1814, Sir Walter Scott met a dwarfish traveller in the Orkneys, whom the natives regarded as a “Pecht” or Pict. So says Andrew Lang. The Picts have been so swallowed up in oblivion that they are like “the ten lost tribes of Israel”--who never were “lost” in any sense but that of absence of records, and from a genealogical point of view. I have met intelligent persons who thought “the dead cities of the Zuyder Zee”--so denominated by Henri Havard--were as Pompeii and only waiting to be excavated and come to resurrection in museums! The Picts of Scotland are exactly where the ancient Ebisu or Ainu of Japan are--in the veins of the people now called the Japanese. The descendants of the Picts to-day talk Scotch, or English, either of the American or British variety. It is no more fashionable in Scotland to trace one’s lineage to Pictish forebears, than in Japan to the Ainu or Ebisu, from whom millions of Japanese are descended. Who wants to be descended from common savages, when gods, kings, nobles, and chiefs are as plentiful as herring or blackberries? CHAPTER X STIRLING: CASTLE, TOWN, AND TOWERS