Clean aims, rare faculties, strength and youth, They have poured them freely forth For the sake of the sun-steeped land they left And the far green isle in the North. _Australia’s Men_, by DOROTHEA MACKELLAR. For the first time in the life of each of us Phœbe and I have been to Scotland. It is excusable in Phœbe, who is so many years my junior and only paid her first visit to the British Isles in 1904, but I am ashamed to think I have been going to and fro upon the earth and the sea for nearly half a century without once crossing the Border. And yet the postponement of this excursion into the near unknown is not without advantages. One has heard of people who had neither permission nor opportunity to read the Bible till they were grown up, and to them it came as a revelation of wonder and beauty. That is what the Highlands have been to us whose minds have already been filled with impressions of various shapes, colours, sizes, and consistencies till it is surprising there should be one corner left, one spot of absorbent tissue upon which the imprint of a new sensation may be received. The long journey, undertaken at a moment when London was like a basement kitchen and even Perth no better than a stuffy attic, ended in the aromatic ethereal sweetness of a six-mile drive through heather, bog-myrtle, and bracken, past twisted firs, red-barked and shaggy-headed, standing crookedly against a blushing sunset sky. We woke next morning with the waters of Lochalsh plashing and murmuring not many yards from our beds. Ten huge seagulls screamed and squabbled over their breakfast on a field of orange seaweed slashed with silver pools and embossed with blue-black knobs of granite; and with them, grudgingly tolerated as humble retainers, were three hoodie crows and a yellow hen with nine chicks of mixed parentage. Beyond the pools lay a stretch of darkling water shadowed by the black velvet hills of Skye—twin hills that faced us with a narrow strait between them leading south. It was hard to dress quickly with half one’s attention flying out of the window, but the prospect of eating real porridge was alluring, and after breakfast the exploration of a new world. We would not have changed places with Columbus.