the Firth lies a sheet of silver sparkling with diamonds.

From the East Neuk to the Bass it is some twelve miles across, and this great stretch of water extends with little diminution of its breadth right up to the port of Leith; there the shores begin to draw in, and a few miles farther up we come to the narrow strait between North and South Queensferry.

Above, the Firth broadens again in the land-locked haven, soon to be the rendezvous of a great part of our fleet, and twelve miles farther up, the river begins.

And what of the shores of this noble estuary? At the entrance, on either side, lie the lands of East Lothian and the East Neuk of Fife, great flat stretches of the finest farming-land in Scotland. On the south side this great band of rich alluvial land is bounded by ranges of hills, the Lammermoors, the Moorfoots, and the Pentlands, drawing nearer as one goes up the Firth, till at Edinburgh they approach within some six miles of the shore, and then falling back to come closer again in the high lands of Stirlingshire. On

the north side the Ochils and the Lomonds bound an equally rich and beautiful tract in the Kingdom of Fife. Within those limits has been enacted most of Scotland's dramatic

story. There could be no finer stage, and the drama has been full of moving scenes; some gay with the glamour of old-world romance; many grim with tragedy, grisly with horror-scenes of bloodshed and strife disfiguring so fair a scene. But this too is nature, the human nature of a less artificial age than ours, when virtues and vices were rougher and ruder, but mixed in much the same proportions as we find to-day.

The players are many and various: kings and their courts, invading armies that come and go leaving desolation in their track; the quiet monastic settlements rearing grey towers among the woodlands; the busy townships, each one with its sturdy burghers, struggling into independence.

Indeed it is not one, but many pageants, which strangely interwoven make up the history of Scotland. We shall take them piecemeal as we wander round the shores of the

Firth, each place having its own associations; some memories of gay courts, others of cool sequestered cloisters; some recalling tales of war and battle, others redolent of the more peaceful victories of civil life.

The first scene opens with Roman galleys in the Firth and Roman legions on the shore, but the picture is vague and indefinite. Time and again they come, push into the fastnesses of the north; each time, though victorious, they are forced to retreat, and, in the end, take up their position in the southern shore. Finally the wall from Forth to Clyde is built, extending the barrier to the western sea, and marking once and for all the limit of the Roman Conquest of Scotland. But the pictures are faint and dim, seen in broken and intermittent glimpses, and darkness settles down again.

When the Roman legions are withdrawn, Scottish history is once more merged in oblivion. We know little of what happened in the early centuries of the Christian era. A Celtic people inhabited the land, whose language still lingers in many of our place names,

and was spoken generally when Malcolm Canmore brought his bride to Dunfermline. In those early days the people were broken up into local divisions, each with its own petty ruler, and engaged in perpetual internecine strife. In the lowlands, the "Kingdom of Fife," isolated as it is by nature, seems to have been one of the latest of these divisions to preserve its independence; but it is little more than a hundred and fifty years since the Highland tribes were still under the despotic rule of their local chieftains. It was only after the Jacobite rising of 1715 and 1745, when roads were driven through these wild tracts of mountain and moorland, that modern conditions began there to supplant the old patriarchal rule. But in the days after the Roman occupation all Scotland lay under the same primitive system, and it was only the assaults of the Danes and other piratical invaders that drove the scattered tribes to combine against the common enemy.

A gentler influence too was making itself felt, which quietly but surely was doing the

work of civilisation, for the Culdee priests spread over the land, bringing the light of Christianity and laying the foundations of the religious houses destined to play so prominent a part in the future. But our knowledge of these times is rather that of legend than of history. We are told a priest called Regulus in the year 370 A.D. was wrecked in Muckross Bay, but having in his keeping portions of the body of the martyred St. Andrew, his life was miraculously saved. The relics of the saint have disappeared, but the square tower of St. Regulus and the old town of St. Andrews still remain to perpetuate the legend.

of

With the Norman Conquest, Scotland, as well as England, enters a new era, the age the great builders. The old Culdee churches and settlements are succeeded by the stately piles of the old cathedrals and monasteries, of which, alas! only the ruins now survive. But it was not churches alone that were built. Even now, on each side of the Forth, a frowning ruin, massive in its decay, every here and there raises its battered head. And on the south side of the Firth a series of tremendous fortresses dom