As for the inns: “Change-houses they call them, poor small cottages, where you must be content to take what you find, perhaps Eggs with Chicks in them, and some Long Cale; at the better sort of them a dish of chop’d Chickens, which they esteem a dainty dish, and will take it unkindly if you do not eat very heartily of it.” Oddly enough, he says nothing of porridge. But St. Jerome attributed the heresy of Pelagius to his feeding upon oatmeal porridge, which may perhaps be responsible for more religious difficulties than we are aware of. The heresy of Pelagius (whose real name was Morgan, and himself therefore presumably a Welshman), was divided into six points, chief of them being what one is tempted to characterise as the “common-sense” view that Adam’s sin was confined to his own person. The daring Pelagius was condemned, A.D. 418, as an heretic, but he lived on, notwithstanding, to the age of threescore years and ten: a jolly, fat man, by all accounts, and of distinctly anti-celibate views. It is rarely, nowadays, you see a plaid, and not often a kilt. Nowhere is the sight now seen that once astonished travellers: the sight of countryfolk walking barefoot, carrying shoes and stockings in their hands, for sake of economy, until they reached the outskirts of a town, where, for sake of appearance, they put them on. The once poor country has grown a great deal beyond that. But kilts formed the only wear at the time of the rebellion of 1745, when one unhappy detachment of rebels found them rather embarrassing. An English subaltern, in command of a few men, had the good fortune to secure a numerically superior body of rebels, and was sorely at a loss what to do with them on the march to Carlisle; being afraid that they would on their way, finding themselves more powerful, turn upon his small force and wreak a terrible revenge. The happy idea struck him of having the waist-bands of the prisoners’ kilts cut before the march was begun: and thus they went; the Scotsmen being too busily engaged in holding their petticoats up to be in any way dangerous. Only on festive occasions is the kilt in evidence, in all its barbaric varieties of tartan. The Royal Stuart tartan is an eye-searing affair of bright red, with a pattern of green, black, blue, and white stripes, calculated to make an æsthete faint. The Macmillan tartan would please the old negress who wanted “nothing startling: just plain red and yellow.” It is bright yellow with a plaid pattern in light red. One of the Macdonald clans sports a nice thing in red with bright green patterns. Such a taste in dress seems oddly at variance with the grey, Calvinistic religious temper of Scotland, and a direct challenge to dull northern skies. [Sidenote: _PRACTICAL SCOTS_]