In the _Antiquary’s_ period, we know how Fife was reached from Edinburgh by crossing the Firth at Queensferry, as old as Malcolm Canmore’s English consort, or by the longer sail from Leith to Kinghorn, where Alexander III. broke his neck to Scotland’s woe. A more roundabout land route was _via_ Stirling, chosen by prudent souls like the old wife who, being advised to put her trust in Providence for the passage, replied, “Na, na, sae lang as there’s a brig at Stirling I’ll no fash Providence!” Lord Cockburn records how that conscientious divine, Dr John Erskine, feeling it his duty to vote in a Fife election, when too infirm to bear the motion of boat or carriage, arranged to walk all the way by Stirling, but was saved this fortnight’s pilgrimage by the contest being given up. Till the building of its Firth bridges, the North British Railway’s passengers had to tranship both in entering and leaving Fife, a mild taste of adventure for small schoolboys. Now, as all the world knows, the shores of Lothian are joined to Fife by that monumental Forth Bridge that humps itself into view miles away. Then all the world has heard of the unlucky Tay Bridge, graceful but treacherous serpent as it proved in its first form, when one stormy Sabbath night it let a train be blown into the sea. By these constructions the line has now a clear course on which to race its Caledonian rival, either for Perth or Aberdeen. But [Illustration: THE CASTLE OF ST. ANDREWS, FIFESHIRE] there is no racing done on the cobweb of North British branches woven to catch Fife-farers, at whose junctions, as a local statistician has calculated, the average Fifer wastes one-seventh of his life or thereabouts. Ladybank Junction, stranded on its moor, used to have the name of a specially penitential waiting-place, which yet lent itself to romantic account in one of those _Tales from Blackwood_. The towns of Fife are many rather than much. Cupar, the county seat, is still a quiet little place, whose Academy stands on the site of a Macduff stronghold, recalling that Thane of Fife with whom the Dukedom of our generation is connected only in title. “He that maun to Cupar, maun to Cupar,” says the proverb, but few strangers seem to risk this vague condemnation. When James Ray passed through the town on his way to Culloden, he has little to tell of it unless that he put up at the “Cooper’s Arms” which, more by token, was kept by the Widow Cooper. The above proverb, by the way, seems to belong to Coupar-Angus, usually so distinguished in spelling, and is transferred to its namesake by “Cupar-justice,” a Fife version of the code honoured at Jedburgh. A Scotch cooper or couper may not have to do with barrels, unless indirectly in the way of business, but is also a chaffer or chapman, _par excellence_, of horses; and one would like to believe, if philologists did not shake their heads, that these towns got their name as markets, like English Chippings and Cheaps.