packing them in heather. I'll warrant that Aaron's rod bore no bonnier
blossoms than these stiff little bushes--and none more magical.
For every time I take up a handful of them they transport me to
the Highlands, and send me tramping once more, with knapsack and
fishing-rod, over the braes and down the burns.


I.

BELL-HEATHER.


Some of my happiest meanderings in Scotland have been taken under the
lead of a book. Indeed, for travel in a strange country there can be
no better courier. Not a guide-book, I mean, but a real book, and, by
preference, a novel.

Fiction, like wine, tastes best in the place where it was grown. And the
scenery of a foreign land (including architecture, which is artificial
landscape) grows less dreamlike and unreal to our perception when we
people it with familiar characters from our favourite novels. Even on a
first journey we feel ourselves among old friends. Thus to read Romola
in Florence, and Les Miserables in Paris, and Lorna Doone on Exmoor, and
The Heart of Midlothian in Edinburgh, and David Balfour in the Pass of
Glencoe, and The Pirate in the Shetland Isles, is to get a new sense of
the possibilities of life. All these things have I done with much inward
contentment; and other things of like quality have I yet in store; as,
for example, the conjunction of The Bonnie Brier-Bush with Drumtochty,
and The Little Minister with Thrums, and The Raiders with Galloway.
But I never expect to pass pleasanter days than those I spent with A