I noticed on this day’s walk the same singular habit that struck me in the north part of Yorkshire; that is, of cutting inward upon the standing grain.  Several persons, frequently women and boys, follow the mowers, and pick up the swath and bind it into sheaves, using no rake at all in the process.  So pertinaciously they seem to adhere to this remarkable and awkward custom, that I saw two mowers walk down a hill, a distance of full a hundred rods, with their scythes under their arms, in order to begin a new swath in the same way; four or five men and women running after them full tilt to bind the grain as it fell!  Here was a loss of at least five minutes each to half a dozen hands, amounting to half an hour to a single man at the end of each swath or work.  Supposing the mowers made twenty in ten hours from bottom to top of the field, here is the loss of one whole day for one man, or one sixth of the whole aggregate time applied to the harvesting of the crop, given to the mere running down that hill of six pairs of legs for no earthly purpose but to cut inward instead of outward, as we do.  The grain-ricks in Scotland are nearly all round and quite small.  Every one of them is rounded up at the top and fitted with a Mandarin-looking hat of straw, which sheds the rain well.  A good-sized farm-house is flanked with quite a village of these little round stacks, looking like a comfortable colony of large, yellow tea-caddies in the distance.

Reached Perth a little after dark, having made a walk of nearly twenty miles after 11 a.m.  Here I remained over the Sabbath, and greatly enjoyed both its rest and the devotional exercises in some of the churches of the city.

The Fair City of Perth is truly most beautifully situated at the head of navigation on the Tay, as Stirling is on the Forth.  It has no mountainous eminence in its midst, castle-crowned, like Stirling, from which to look off upon such a scene as the latter commands.  But Nature has erected grand and lofty observatories near by in the Moncrieffe and Kinnoull Hills, from which a splendid prospect is unrolled to the eye.  There is some historical or legendary authority for the idea that the Romans contemplated this view from Moncrieffe Hill; and, as the German army, returning homeward from France, shouted with wild enthusiasm, at its first sight, Der Rhein!  Der Rhein! so these soldiers of the Caesars shouted at the view of the Tay and the Corse of Gowrie, Ecce Tiber!  Ecce Compus Martius!  There was more patriotism than parity in the comparison.  The Italian river is a Rhine in history, but a mere Goose Creek within its actual banks compared with the Tay.  In history, Perth has its full share of “love and murder,” rhyme and romance, sieges, battering and burning, royals and rebels.  In the practical life of to-day, it is a progressive, thriving town, busy, intelligent, respected and honorable.  The two natural features which would attract, perhaps, the most special attention