Tobermory. There is nothing required, you would say, but
a little patience and a taste for exercise and bad air.
To breathe dust and bombazine, to feed the mind on
cackling gossip, to hear three parts of a case and drink
a glass of sherry, to long with indescribable longings
for the hour when a man may slip out of his travesty and
devote himself to golf for the rest of the afternoon, and
to do this day by day and year after year, may seem so
small a thing to the inexperienced! But those who have
made the experiment are of a different way of thinking,
and count it the most arduous form of idleness.

More swing doors open into pigeon-holes where judges
of the First Appeal sit singly, and halls of audience
where the supreme Lords sit by three or four. Here, you
may see Scott's place within the bar, where he wrote many
a page of Waverley novels to the drone of judicial
proceeding. You will hear a good deal of shrewdness,
and, as their Lordships do not altogether disdain
pleasantry, a fair proportion of dry fun. The broadest
of broad Scotch is now banished from the bench; but the
courts still retain a certain national flavour. We have
a solemn enjoyable way of lingering on a case. We treat
law as a fine art, and relish and digest a good
distinction. There is no hurry: point after point must
be rightly examined and reduced to principle; judge after
judge must utter forth his OBITER DICTA to delighted
brethren.

Besides the courts, there are installed under the