Elgin, the town, built of a warm, yellow sandstone that helps it to a cheerful look, may call itself a city in right of what seems to have been the noblest Cathedral in Scotland, violated by wild Highlandmen when this lowland strip too much invited plunder and ravage. The town has other ruins to show, besides those of Pluscarden Priory some miles off, and of Spynie Palace on the way [Illustration: STRATH GLASS, INVERNESS-SHIRE] to Lossiemouth, Elgin’s rising bathing-place, whose name should be familiar to readers of George MacDonald’s novels. A little farther along the coast, Nairn, which a Scots king boasted for so long as to have one end in the Highlands, the other in the Lowlands, is now able to hold itself up as the “Brighton of the North,” recommended by a mild climate, and by golf-links on the shore, not perched on diabolic downs, as behind the Londoner’s resort. Gouty southrons may well find their way so far north, but they do ill to pass by the recesses of this country, now that the Highland Railway cuts straight across from Aviemore to Inverness. Grantown above Speyside, indeed, is much sought as a high and dry health resort. Another place that begins to put in a claim to the same favour is Tomintoul, at the south end of Banff, the loftiest village in the Highlands, a hundred feet or so higher than Buxton, and with a chalybeate well that would work fashionable cures if it could only get a London doctor to patronise it, while the sub-Alpine site and the mainly Catholic population might help to give an illusion of _Swillingheim-am-Fluss_ or _Argent les Eaux_. A very illustrious author expressed the picturesqueness of Tomintoul by calling it the “dirtiest, poorest village in the whole of the Highlands,” but that was a generation ago, and the Tomintoulers are not likely to insist on perpetuating such a compliment, as Aberdeen solicitors to this day take the higher style of Advocates, because once so addressed by King James. A more famous spring, as yet, of this region rises in a distillery which does not want a _vates sacer_-- Fairshon had a son who married Noah’s daughter, And nearly spoilt ta Flood, by drinking up ta water, Which he would have done, I verily believe it, Had ta mixture been only half Glenlivet.