As the cortege passed up the streets along which Prince Charlie had passed when he held court at Holyrood just ninety-seven years before, as she received at the site of the old Tolbooth the keys of the city from the Lord Provost, bending the knee beside his fellow-burghers, clad in the old costumes of the Trades, and close beside a guard of honour of Highlanders headed by the present Duke of Argyll; or as she stood surveying from the topmost battery of the citadel her fair ancestral domains of Lothian and Fife, and the distant mountains which tower o'er Loch Lomond and the Trossachs, some such proud and pathetic recollections as these must have occupied and touched the heart of the youngest and the mightiest monarch in Europe. Their closer acquaintance with Edinburgh increased the mingled amazement and delight of the Queen and Prince. Prince Albert pronounced the view of it from the margin of the Firth of Forth as "fairy-like," "what you would imagine as a thing to dream of, or to see in a picture." He said he felt sure the Acropolis could not be finer, and the Queen at once recognised the appropriateness of the idealised metamorphosis of "Auld Reekie" (_Anglice_, "Old Smoky") into "the Modern Athens." The Leith ticket-porters, mounted on flower-decked horses, with broad, ribbon-decorated Kilmarnock bonnets, and the pretty Newhaven fishwives, with their clear, peachy complexions and Danish costumes, were objects of peculiar interest. [Sidenote: THE QUEEN IN THE HIGHLANDS.] Space fails us to enter into details of the further incidents of this, the Queen's first visit to her Scottish dominion. Enough to say that she received in the Highlands, where she visited in succession not a few of her oldest nobles of Gaelic and Norman descent, receptions as rapturous as that which she experienced in the Modern Athens. The welcome, if it could not be more hearty, was at least attended with more picturesque accessories in the romantic region where the dialect and the "garb of Old Gael" still to a large extent prevail. At Dupplin Castle, at Scone Palace, where her ancestors were crowned, at Blair Athole, at Taymouth, and at Drummond Castle, she was entertained with equal splendour, and with the true and special elements of "Highland Welcome." She may be almost said to have passed through a continuous succession of triumphal arches. Every chieftain brought out all his available clansmen, all in kilts, claymores, and Glengarry bonnets, to act as guards of honour. Balls, in which the national dances, performed by the best born cadets of the noble houses of whom she was the guest, constituted the chief feature, alternated with deer-stalking, for the especial behoof of the Prince; processions of boats on the lake through which rolls the Tay, a river only less rapid than the Spey; and visits to places of historic interest or romantic beauty.