Kirkcaldy’s whalers now grow legendary, and strangers beholding her shipping to-day, may take for a northern joke that this ranks as the third Scottish port of entry; but the fact is that a whole string of Fife harbours are officially knotted together under its name, as all North America was once tacked on to the manor of Greenwich, and every British child born at sea belongs to the parish of Stepney. The coast-line here is thick-set with little towns of business and pleasure, grimy coal ports and odorous fishing havens, alternating with bathing beaches and golf-links in the openings of the low cliffs. At the western edge has now been taken in the old burgh Culross, pronounced in a manner that may strike strangers as curious. Not far from the Forth Bridge is the prettiest of Edinburgh seaside resorts, Aberdour, with its own ruins to show, and the remains of an abbey on Inchcolm that shuts in its bay, and behind it Lord Moray’s mansion of Donibristle, part of which stands a charred shell, burned down and rebuilt three times till its owner accepted what seemed a decree of fate. Opposite Edinburgh, Burntisland’s prosaic features make a setting for the castle of Rossend, with its romantic scandal about Queen Mary and Chastelard. Beyond Kirkcaldy come Leven and Largo, trying to grow together about the statue of Alexander Selkirk; and Largo House was home of a more ancient Fifeshire mariner, Andrew Wood, his “Yellow Frigate” a sore thorn in England’s side, as commemorated by a novel of James Grant, who wrote so many once-so-popular romances of war. Fife coast towns have a way of sorting themselves in couples. At the corner of the bay overlooked by Largo Law, Elie and Earlsferry flourish together as a family bathing place, behind which, at the pronunciation of Kilconquhar the uninitiated may take a thousand guesses in vain. Then we have Anstruther and Crail on Fifeness, that sharp point of the East Neuk of Fife. Round this, at the mouth of the Eden, we come to St. Andrews, “gem of the province.”