cross-roads at Fairmilehead. It leads yet another hundred feet higher, a gentle ascent between fields and pastures, and across a tiny trickling burn fringed with willows, to the green slopes at the foot of Caerketton, one of the Pentland range. Passing a big open cart-shed, many empty carts, a cottage or two, cackling poultry, and a barking dog, you come to Swanston, the garden gate open, giving a most alarming view of a very modern and grotesque effigy of Tam o’ Shanter--usually taken for a statue of Stevenson--which is set on a rockery half-way up the little drive. All this is visible and prominent; but the village lies hidden behind the house; and Swanston Cottage, Stevenson’s home, is a little to one side, on the slope of the hill, and remains unseen, especially in spring or summer when the trees are full of leaf. Swanston itself, now a farm, was originally a grange belonging to some neighbouring religious house, probably Currie, and is a fine old stone building, its tall gabled side having the characteristically Scottish “crow steps.” The road continues, a mere cart track, in front of the garden wall, and curls round at the back to some modern cottages, “stane sclated”; and here it ends, as if unwilling to betray that a few steps farther on is one of the prettiest villages in Scotland--a rustic group of thatched and harled homesteads, with here and there fenced-in gardens of old-fashioned flowers, and all set round about an irregular patch of village green and Swanston Burn, beside which play the little healthy, bonny Scottish bairns, “like tumbled fruit in grass.” The inhabitants of this village remember Stevenson well. They thought he was “daft.” His fame has not yet impressed them. “Ay, he was much aboot the place,” an old dame will say, indifferently. “But, whenever the wind was in the east, he would be off to his grandfather’s at Colinton,” a hale and sturdy old man will add. “He was much aboot the place.” To the Stevenson lover this is its charm to-day--above the bleating of the lambs, above the delight of the wholesome air, above the tones and tints of thatch against the hill or of wood reek against the sky. And yet, to Stevenson, it was all these things that charmed, and that he recollected so tenderly when he lay slowly dying in far-away Samoa: the barking of the sheep-dog and the voice of the shepherd in the grey early morning, and the pure air that was “rustically scented”--all the sights and sounds so dear to the country-lover. And yet, climb up a little among the whins and the pastures behind his home, and turn--and there lies Edinburgh below you, painted like a picture in the haze of smoke and sunshine. [Illustration: THE WATER OF LEITH FROM DEAN BRIDGE We are looking west up stream, towards the sun setting behind Corstorphine Hill. Above the waterfall is a distillery with its chimney pointing to the Dean U.F. Church. On the right of the picture are the two towers of the Orphan Hospital.] CHAPTER XI