It would even lead us as far as Forfar and its loch and castles, and the rival little burgh of Kirriemuir--the "Thrums" of recent delightful sketches of old-world Scottish "wabster" and kirk life in Angus--and detain us to the end of the chapter. We resume, instead, the line of the Tay below Meikleour and Kinclaven, and beyond the "Coble o' Cargill," replaced by the more prosaic bridge carrying the railway line from Perth to Aberdeen. This is the heart of Strathmore--the "great valley." Ballathy, Stobhall, Muckersy, and Stanley maintain the repute of the Tay for noble prospects of hill, wood, and stream. Stobhall was the seat of the Drummond family--still a power in Perthshire--before they removed to Drummond Castle on the Earn; and near by, at the Campsie Linn, beside an ancient cell of the monks of Coupar-Angus Abbey, is the waterfall over which--_teste_ the author of the "Fair Maid of Perth"--Conacher, the refugee from the battle on the North Inch, flung himself to hide his shame. Macbeth's Castle, on Dunsinane Hill, and the field of Luncarty--where, nine centuries ago, the peasant ancestor of the Hays of Tweeddale, Errol, and Kinnoull is said to have turned the battle for the Scots against the Danes with his plough-yoke--might detain us. But now, close ahead, the explorer of Tayside views, fringing the right bank of the river for miles opposite the mouth of the Almond, and extending to the environs of the Royal City of Perth, the woods of Scone-- "Towers and battlements he sees, Bosomed high on tufted trees."