I am informed of a movement for putting the kingdom of Fife in its right place before a world too apt to jest at its pretensions. These are many and serious. Of old, _Fibh_ had kings of its own, of such immemorial antiquity that their very names, much more their portraits, are not forthcoming. Enclosed between two firths, this region makes almost an island, with the Ochils as border-line cutting it off from the rest of Scotland. Thus the Roman legions thundered by it; and its maiden independence was never violated, if we reject a scandalous suggestion as to Cupar being the Mount Graupius of Tacitus. The kings of Scotland were much at home here, notably Malcolm Canmore, that effectual founder of the modern kingdom. If Bruce were born who knows where, he came to be buried at Dunfermline. History tells how Queen Mary was lodged at Lochleven, and how more than one King James had to be snatched away, by force or fraud, from his chosen residence in Fife. The dialect of Fife, mixed with that of Lothian, made the standard Court language, while Gaelic was ebbing out of the Perthshire straths. The see of the old Scottish Church was at St. Andrews, where arose the first northern university, the local Saint Regulus being supplanted by that apostle who, according to scoffers, was chosen as Scotland’s patron because of the keen eye he showed on earth for loaves and fishes. In Protestant days, several of the religious leaders--Knox, the Melvilles, the Erskines, John Glas, Edward Irving, Thomas Chalmers--were all either natives of or sojourners in Fife. This [Illustration: A HIGHLAND STRATH] many-havened coast was the nursery of the Scottish navy and commerce. The most famous national product, next to flesh and blood and whisky, is golf, whose headquarters are in the East Neuk of this choice shire. When we consider the many towns of Fife, its wealth in horn and corn, and coal and fish, its output of textile fabrics, and remember its past history, should we not allow that this and not Perthshire is truly the heart of Scotland? It has even a Wales in Kinross, whose craving for separate status might one day raise a troublesome question. Nor does it want a classic bard to invoke for it the trumpet of fame: Nymphae, quae colitis highissima monta Fifaea, Seu vos Pittenwema tenent, seu Cralia crofta, Sive Anstraea domus, ubi nat haddocus in undis, Codlineusque ingens, et fleucca et sketta pererrant Per costam, et scopulis lobster monifootus in udis Creepat, et in mediis ludit whitenius undis, _etc._