_’With dearest love, old Em,_ _’Thine,_ _’Carry.’_ And then she had to copy the verses; but when she had done that, and risen, and gone to the window for a time, some misgiving seemed to enter her mind, for she returned to the table, and sate down again, and wrote this postscript: ’Perhaps, after all, you won’t see much in this little piece; if you were here, among the very places, and affected by all the old stories and romantic traditions and the wild scenery, it might be different. Since I’ve been to Europe I’ve come to see what’s the trouble about our reading English history and literature at home; why, you can’t do it, you can’t understand it, unless you have lived in an atmosphere that is just full of poetry and romance, and meeting people whose names tell you they belong to the families who did great things in history centuries and centuries ago. I can’t explain it very well—not even to myself; but I feel it; why, you can’t take a single day’s drive in England without coming across a hundred things of interest—Norman churches, and the tombs of Saxon Kings, and old abbeys, and monasteries, and battlefields, and, just as interesting as any, farm-houses of the sixteenth century in their quaint old-fashioned orchards. And as for Scotland, why, it is just steeped to the lips in poetry and tradition; the hills and the glens have all their romantic stories of the clans, many of them very pathetic; and you want to see these wild and lonely places before you can understand the legends. And in southern Scotland too—what could any one at home make of such a simple couplet as this— _"The King sits in Dunfermline town,_ _Drinking the blude-red wine;"_