Penelope's Progress: Being Such Extracts from the Commonplace Book of Penelope Hamilton As Relate to Her Experiences in ScotlandWiggin, Kate Douglas Smith
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Penelope's Progress: Being Such Extracts from the Commonplace Book of Penelope Hamilton As Relate to Her Experiences in Scotland
Wiggin, Kate Douglas Smith
Americans -- Scotland -- Fiction; Scotland -- Social life and customs -- 19th century -- Fiction
We learned in what direction the soldiers had gone, and pursuing the
same path found the young lady on the corner of a street near by. She
was quite unabashed. "You don't know what you have missed!" she said
excitedly. "Let us get into this tram, and possibly we can head them
off somewhere. They may be going into battle, and if so my heart's
blood is at their service. It is one of those experiences that come
only once in a lifetime. There were pipes and there were kilts! (I
didn't suppose they ever really wore them outside of the theatre!)
When you have seen the kilts swinging, Salemina, you will never be the
same woman afterwards! You never expected to see the Olympian gods
walking, did you? Perhaps you thought they always sat on practicable
rocks and made stiff gestures from the elbow, as they do in the Wagner
operas? Well, these gods walked, if you can call the inspired gait a
walk! If there is a single spinster left in Scotland, it is because
none of these ever asked her to marry him. Ah, how grateful I ought to
be that I am free to say 'yes,' if a kilt ever asks me to be his! Poor
Penelope, yoked to your commonplace trousered Beresford! (I wish the
tram would go faster!) You must capture one of them, by fair means or
foul, Penelope, and Salemina and I will hold him down while you paint
him,--there they are, they are there somewhere, don't you hear them?"
There they were indeed, filing down the grassy slopes of the Gardens,
swinging across one of the stone bridges, and winding up the Castle
Hill to the Esplanade like a long, glittering snake; the streamers of
their Highland bonnets waving, their arms glistening in the sun, and
the bagpipes playing "The March of the Cameron Men." The pipers
themselves were mercifully hidden from us on that first occasion, and
it was well, for we could never have borne another feather's weight of
ecstasy.
It was in Princes Street that we had alighted,--named thus for the
prince who afterwards became George IV.--and I hope he was, and is,
properly grateful. It ought never to be called a street, this most
magnificent of terraces, and the world has cause to bless that
interdict of the Court of Sessions in 1774, which prevented the
Gradgrinds of the day from erecting buildings along its south side,--a
sordid scheme that would have been the very superfluity of
naughtiness.
It was an envious Glasgow body who said grudgingly, as he came out of
Waverley Station, and gazed along its splendid length for the first
time, "_Weel, wi' a' their haverin', it's but half a street,
onyway!_"--which always reminded me of the Western farmer who came
from his native plains to the beautiful Berkshire hills. "I've always
heard o' this scenery," he said. "Blamed if I can find any scenery;
but if there was, nobody could see it, there's so much high ground in
the way!"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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