Scorched and blasted as much of the ground about Glasgow is, this city lies hard by some of the finest and most famed scenes of Scotland, to be easily reached by land or water. Even busy Paisley, nurse of poets as well as of weavers, has a point of high antiquarian interest in its restored Abbey Church; and a stretch of moorland rises behind smoky Greenock, with its monuments to James Watt and to “Highland Mary.” Not to speak of land-and sea-scapes “down the water,” up the river, Clydesdale shows us on what green banks and braes Glasgow once stood, which may yet spread its octopus arms about Cadzow and Bothwell Castles and the Tower of “Tillietudlem.” There has been talk of harnessing to industry those rushing Falls of Clyde, the upper linn, Bonnington, a miniature of Niagara that is already slave to the Philistines. Below this fall, the mills of New Lanark record the well-meant industrial experiments of David Dale and his son-in-law Robert Owen. In a cave near the Stonebyres Fall, young William Wallace took hiding after he had slain the English sheriff at Lanark, where now the hero’s statue stands over the church door, strangely arrayed in a kilt that gives him somewhat the aspect of that snuff-shop Scotsman. Wallace came from the Renfrewshire Ellerslie, and many of his guerilla exploits were in this west country, though his noblest monument has found a proper site near Stirling. Ayr, town of “honest men and bonnie lasses,” cherishes other legends and memorials of him, here almost forgotten in the renown of Robert Burns’s birthplace near the mouth of his “bonnie Doon.” An hour’s stroll along the seashore from Ayr brings us to that humble cottage, better neighboured by “Alloway’s auld haunted kirk” than by the pretentious classical monument that so ill fits Scotland’s “barefoot Muse.” Then from this coast to Dumfries, the valleys of the Ayr and the Nith are sown with memories and needless monuments of the poet who spoke the people’s heart. Above Nithsdale, in the south of Lanark, rise the Lowther Hills, that for height might call cousins with some Highland Bens. Here stands Leadhills, the highest village in Scotland, birthplace of Allan Ramsay; and near the wider pass, through which went the old highroad to the south, may be sought out the “sudden and immense depths” of the Enterkin, renowned by Defoe and by Dr. John Brown, as gloomy scene of an encounter between persecuting dragoons and the armed Covenanters, who had many a fastness in this hill-country. The “Scott country” has its brightest associations in chivalric war. The “Burns country,” which is also the Wallace country and the Bruce country, has been the cradle of the strongest Scottish sentiment, as of the most popular movements. Long before Burns was born, it got the familiar name of the Whig country, as congenial soil [Illustration: THE FALLS OF THE CLYDE, LANARKSHIRE]