“There does not seem much beauty to spare in the east of Fife. Low hills, great breadths of level fields: the sea a great expanse of blue or leaden grey, fringed with low reefs of dark rocks like the teeth of some hungry monster, dangerous and grim without being picturesque, without a ship to break its monotony. But yet with those limitless breadths of sky and cloud, the wistful clearness and golden after-glow, and all the varying blueness of the hills, it would have been difficult to surpass the effect of the great amphitheatre of sea and land of which this solitary grey old house formed the centre. The hill, behind which the sun had set, is scarcely considerable enough to have a name; but it threw up its outline against the wonderful greenness, blueness, goldenness of the sky with a grandeur which would not have misbecome an Alp. Underneath its shelter, grey and sweet, lay the soft levels of Stratheden in all their varying hues of colour, green corn, and brown earth, and red fields of clover, and dark belts of wood. Behind were the two paps of the Lomonds, rising green against the clear serene: and on the other side entwining lines of hills, with gleams of golden light breaking through the mists, clearing here and there as far as the mysterious Grampians, far off under Highland skies. This was one side of the circle; and the other was the sea, a sea still blue under the faint evening skies, in which the young moon was rising; the yellow sands of Forfarshire on one hand, stretching downwards from the mouth of the Tay, the low brown cliffs and green headlands bending away on the other towards Fifeness--and the great bow of water reaching to the horizon between. Nearer the eye, showing half against the slope of the coast, and half against the water, rose St. Andrews on its cliff, the fine dark tower of the college church poised over the little city, the jagged ruins of the castle marking the outline, the cathedral rising majestically in naked pathos; and old St. Rule, homely and weather-beaten, oldest venerable pilgrim of all, standing strong and steady, at watch upon the younger centuries.” From the flattest part of Fife, let us turn to its inland Highland side. The main North British line to Perth, after passing a dreary coal-field, brings us suddenly beneath the bold swell of Benarty, round which we come in view of the Lomonds with Loch Leven sparkling at their foot. Here indeed we soon get into the small shire of Kinross; but this may be taken as a dependency of the kingdom of Fife, its lowlands also running on the west side into a miniature Highland region, reached by the railway branch that from Loch Leven goes off to Stirling by the Devon Valley and the Ochils, at the end of which Clackmannan vies with Kinross as the Rutland of Scottish counties.