The capital of Scotland is not only beautiful but eloquent. The present writer does not assume to describe it, or to instruct the reader concerning it, but only to declare that at every step the sensitive mind is impressed with the splendid intellect, the individual force, and the romantic charm of the Scottish character, as it is commemorated and displayed in this delightful place. What a wealth of significance it possesses may be indicated by even the most meagre record and the most superficial commentary upon the passing events of a traveller's ordinary day. The greatest name in the literature of Scotland is Walter Scott. He lived and laboured for twenty-four years in the modest three-story, gray stone house which is No. 39 Castle street. It has been my privilege to enter that house, and to stand in the room in which Scott began the novel of _Waverley_. Many years roll backward under the spell of such an experience, and the gray-haired man is a boy again, with all the delights of the Waverley Novels before him, health shining in his eyes, and joy beating in his heart, as he looks onward through vistas of golden light into a paradise of fadeless flowers and of happy dreams. The room that was Scott's study is a small one, on the first floor, at the back, and is lighted by one large window, opening eastward, through which you look upon the rear walls of sombre, gray buildings, and upon a small slope of green lawn, in which is the unmarked grave of one of Sir Walter's dogs. "The misery of keeping a dog," he once wrote, "is his dying so soon; but, to be sure, if he lived for fifty years and then died, what would become of me?" My attention was called to a peculiar fastening on the window of the study,--invented and placed there by Scott himself,--so arranged that the sash can be safely kept locked when raised a few inches from the sill. On the south side of the room is the fireplace, facing which he would sit as he wrote, and into which, of an evening, he has often gazed, hearing meanwhile the moan of the winter wind, and conjuring up, in the blazing brands, those figures of brave knights and gentle ladies that were to live forever in the amber of his magical art. Next to the study, on the same floor, is the larger apartment that was his dining-room, where his portrait of Claverhouse, now at Abbotsford, once hung above the mantel, and where so many of the famous people of the past enjoyed his hospitality and his talk. On the south wall of this room now hang two priceless autograph letters, one of them in the handwriting of Scott, the other in that of Burns. Both rooms are used for business offices now,--the house being tenanted by the agency of the New Zealand Mortgage Company,--and both are furnished with large presses, for the custody of deeds and family archives. Nevertheless these rooms remain much as they were when Scott lived in them, and his spirit seems to haunt the place. I was brought very