The Muse, nae poet ever fand her Till by himsel’ he learned to wander Adown some trotting burn’s meander, An’ no think lang. If any ill-advised stranger find the streets of the Fair City dull, as would hardly be his lot on market-day, let him turn to Kinnoul Hill for a noble scene, and to the Tay banks for a characteristic one of broad fields and stately woods, backed by the ridge of the Grampians a dozen miles away. For another sample of Scottish aspects he might take the Edinburgh road across the South Inch, and over by Moncrieff Hill to the Bridge of Earn, where he comes into the lower flats of Strathearn, on which a tamed Highland stream winds sinuously to the Tay between its craggy rim and the rounded ridge of the Ochils. The village has a well-built air, due to the neighbourhood of Pitkaithly spa, that in Scott’s day was a local St. Ronan’s, whose patrons lodged at the Bridge of Earn, or even walked out from Perth, to take the waters, which before breakfast, on the top of this exercise, must have had a notable effect in certain cases. The original Spa in Belgium owed much of its credit to the fact of its springs being a mile or two out of the town. Our forefathers’ ignorance of microbes seems to have been tempered by active habits: it was more than a dozen miles Piscator and his friends had to trudge from Tottenham before reaching their morning draught at Hoddesdon. As for Pitkaithly, there is at present an attempt to resuscitate the use of its waters, still dispensed near Kilgraston, a house founded by a Jamaica planter, who had two such sons as General Sir Hope Grant and Sir Francis Grant, P.R.A. This part of Strathearn is a flat lowland plain, on which, once in a way, I have seen a pack of foxhounds, whereas, in the ruggeder mass of the county, as English squires must be scandalised to learn-- Though space and law the stag we lend, Ere hound we slip or bow we bend, Whoever recked where, how, and when, The treacherous fox is trapped or slain.