The “drear and distant regions” are now more admired than the “margins green,” through which the Earn creeps into the Tay a few miles below Perth, where the great river broadens as an estuary about its reclaimed islands. The steamer trip from Perth to Dundee makes a local ploy rather than a tourist link, so few Southrons set eyes on those fat banks backed by richly wooded hills and crags. A little above the confluence stand the ruins of Elcho Castle, which Baddeley dismisses as “commonplace,” and Black finds unworthy of any epithet; but the race it nursed still stands high among Scotland’s nobles; and in or about it was a lair of Wallace’s most daring adventures. A little below, over the Fife border, lies the old seaport of Newburgh, surrounded by outlying spurs of the Ochils that give fine prospects across the Carse of Gowrie upon the opposite amphitheatre of the Sidlaws. Tourists seldom stop at Newburgh to see the adjacent Lindores Abbey and Lindores Loch, and the site of one of Wallace’s battlefields: so much the worse for the tourist. Two or three generations ago, he could not so easily have avoided Newburgh, when it was a noted station of posting and coach traffic from Perth. To me, the flat Rhynds about the mouth of the Earn are of special interest, since they were long the home of my forbears, edged off the Hill of Moncrieff by a junior branch of the same stock, then again taking refuge across the Tay, when their dwindled possessions here had been sold to the house of Elcho. And time was when the eyes of all Scotland turned to this now obscure corner. A mile south of the Earn’s boldest crook, about the Western Rhynd peninsula, Abernethy is still visited by antiquaries for its mysterious round tower, standing over seventy feet high beside the church that has given Dr. Butler, its incumbent, material for a goodly volume. He makes no doubt that this tower was built upon their native models by Irish ecclesiastics, refugees from rude Danish invasion of their own saintly island. The only other such structure in Scotland, left unruined, is at Brechin, both of them better built than the Irish round towers on which ’prentice hands may have been tried. Sculptured stones of still greater antiquity have here escaped iconoclastic zeal, to be broken relics of Abernethy’s former state, poor and out of the way as it stands now.