It is a good sign for the future of a noble race that the manufacture of soap occupies many people in Scotland. Though the glens are full of distilleries, which are sure to create poverty and dirt, perhaps we must consider soap-boiling as a very honorable occupation and the manufacture of this cleansing material as an antidote to some of the mischief done by John Barleycorn. How terrible is the scourge of alcohol in Great Britain was revealed, as never before, during the war crisis of 1915, when even an appeal to patriotism could not make the sodden workmen give up their cups. My kinsman, the United States Consul at Dundee, showed me the statistics of the liquor traffic in Scotland alone, which were appalling. Even Christians, supposed to be devout in worship and genuine in faith, invest their money, and some of them exclusively, in the distilleries, thus upsetting at one end what the gospel agencies are doing at the other. The British Empire is thus handicapped in the race for progress. Yet who from the glorious Yankee nation can throw a stone, especially when he sees the “American bar,” “American long drinks,” and “American mixed drinks” flauntingly advertised in Europe? We have heard, however, that the “long drinks” are soft and harmless. While propelled along Loch Ness, an earth-cleft, narrow, deep, and twenty-four miles in length, we are again reminded of our home near Lake Cayuga, fairest in the Iroquois chain of “finger lakes” in the Empire State, and one of the deepest; for on either side of the Caledonian Canal are metamorphic rocks rising out of crystal clear water, and beneath, in the Byronic profundity of “a thousand feet in depth below,” the rocky bottom. Grander and more rugged, however, is the scenery, for the mountains are here higher, even as the water is deeper, than in Iroquois land. The Scottish Highlands are the fragments of the earliest land that emerged above the prehistoric oceans. For centuries they formed a boundary in ethnology, politics, and religion, even as in the æons of geology they form a frontier of chronology. When our voyage ends, we find that it is some distance between the stopping-place of the steamer at Muirtown and Inverness. Since names and sounds are continually playing tricks, summoning from the privacy of memory forms long ago forgotten and ever retreating in the perspective of the past, I recall my old Scotch professor at the Central High School in Philadelphia. That good man MacMurtrie--with a name meaning, I suppose, of, or from, or son of the Muirtrie, or Moor-tree clan--first introduced thousands of youth, through his lexicon, his fascinating lectures, and his choice cabinets, to the great world of nature and science, and to the rapturous joy of discovery of order and beauty in the mathematics of the universe. From Muirtown, we take the hotel omnibus and soon enter “Rose-red Inverness,” the bright and lively town, which in August bursts into the full bloom of its summer activities.