Devolving from thy parent lake, A charming maze thy waters make, By bowers of birch, and groves of pine, And hedges flower’d with eglantine. Still on thy banks, so gaily green, May numerous herds and flocks be seen, And lasses chanting o’er the pail, And shepherds piping in the dale, And ancient faith that knows no guile, And industry embrown’d with toil, And hearts resolved, and hands prepared, The blessings they enjoy to guard. [Illustration: LOCH ACHRAY AND BEN VENUE, PERTHSHIRE] CHAPTER IV THE KINGDOM OF FIFE Like Somerset, claiming to be something more than a mere shire, the county half fondly, half jestingly entitled a kingdom, lies islanded between two firths, cut off from the world by the sea and from the rest of Scotland by the Ochil ridges. The “Fifers” are thus supposed to be a race apart; but it would be more like the truth to take Fifeishness as the essence of Saxon Scotland. Fife is, in fact, an epitome of the Lowlands, showing great stretches of practically prosaic farming, others of grimy coal-field, with patches of moor, bog, and wind-blown firs, here and there swelling into hill features, that in the abrupt Lomonds attain almost mountain dignity in face of their Highland namesake, sixty miles away. Open to cold sea winds, it nurses the hardy frames of “buirdly chiels and clever hizzies”; and all the invigorating discipline of the northern climate is understood to be concentrated in the East Neuk of Fife, where a weakling like R. L. Stevenson might well sigh over the “flaws of fine weather that we call our northern summer.” It is in the late autumn that this eastern coast is at its best of halcyon days. As we have seen, the poet lived a little farther south who still laid himself open to Tom Hood’s reproach-- ‘Come, gentle spring, ethereal mildness come!’ O Thomson, void of rhyme as well as reason, How could’st thou thus poor human nature _hum_-- There’s no such season!