Jone and me got to like Buxton very much.  We met many pleasant people, and as most of them had a chord in common, we was friendly enough.  Jone said it made him feel sad in the smoking-room to see the men he’d got acquainted with get well and go home, but that’s a kind of sadness that all parties can bear up under pretty well.

I haven’t said a word yet about Scotland, though we have been here a week, but I really must get something about it into this letter.  I was saying to Jone the other day that if I was to meet a king with a crown on his head I am not sure that I should know that king if I saw him again, so taken up would I be with looking at his crown, especially if it had jewels in it such as I saw in the regalia at the Tower of London.  Now Edinburgh seems to strike me in very much the same way.  Prince Street is its crown, and whenever I think of this city it will be of this magnificent street and the things that can be seen from it.

It is a great thing for a street to have one side of it taken away and sunk out of sight so that there is a clear view far and wide, and visitors can stand and look at nearly everything that is worth seeing in the whole town, as if they was in the front seats of the balcony in a theatre, and looking on the stage.  You know I am very fond of the theatre, madam, but I never saw anything in the way of what they call spectacular representation that came near Edinburgh as seen from Prince Street.

But as I said in one of my first letters, I am not going to write about things and places that you can get much better description of in books, and so I won’t take up any time in telling how we stand at the window of our room at the Royal Hotel, and look out at the Old Town standing like a forest of tall houses on the other side of the valley, with the great castle perched up high above them, and all the hills and towers and the streets all spread out below us, with Scott’s monument right in front, with everybody he ever wrote about standing on brackets, which stick out everywhere from the bottom up to the very top of the monument, which is higher than the tallest house, and looks like a steeple without a church to it.  It is the most beautiful thing of the kind I ever saw, and I have made out, or think I have, nearly every one of the figures that’s carved on it.

I think I shall like the Scotch people very much, but just now there is one thing about them that stands up as high above their other good points as the castle does above the rest of the city, and that is the feeling they have for anybody who has done anything to make his fellow-countrymen proud of him.  A famous Scotchman cannot die without being pretty promptly born again in stone or bronze, and put in some open place with seats convenient for people to sit and look at him.  I like this; glory ought to begin at home.

Letter Number Twenty-one

EDINBURGH