Another memorable visit of that summer was to Chillitigham Castle in Northumberland, from whose towers we got views of Flodden Field and the scenes of “Marmion.”  The venerable Earl of Tankerville (who was a contemporary and supporter of Sir Robert Peel in Parliament), and his warm-hearted Countess, who has long been a leader in various Christian philanthropies, entertained us delightfully within walls that had stood for six centuries.  In a forest near the Castle were the famous herd of wild cattle which are the only survivors of the original herd that roamed that region in the days of William the Conqueror.  They are beautiful white creatures, still too wild to be approached very nearly; and Sir Edwin Landseer, an old friend of the Earl, has preserved life-sized portraits of two of them on the walls of the lofty dining hall of the castle.  When the servants, gardeners and other retainers assembled for morning worship in the chapel, the handsome old Earl presided at the melodeon, and the singing was from our American Sankey’s hymn-book, a style of music that would have startled the belted knights and barons bold who worshipped in that chapel five centuries ago.

While at Dundee, as the guests of Mr. Alexander H. Moncur, the Ex-provost of the city, I had the satisfaction of preaching in St. Peters Presbyterian Church, whose pastor, sixty years ago, was that ideal minister, Robert Murray McCheyne.  The Bible from which he delivered his seraphic sermons was still lying on the pulpit.  When I asked a plain woman, the wife of a weaver, what she could tell me about his discourses, her remarkable reply was:  “It did me more good just to see Mr. McCheyne walk from the door to his pulpit than to hear any other man in Dundee.”  A fine tribute, that, to the power of a Christly personality.  A sermon in shoes is often more eloquent and soul-convincing than a sermon on paper.  I spent a very pleasant hour with sturdy John Bright, and he told me that he had more relatives living in America than in England.  His reason for declining the invitation of our government to visit the United States was that he knew too well what our enthusiastic countrymen had in store for him.  The separation of Bright and Gladstone on the question of Irish Home Rule had a certain tragic element of sadness.  When I spoke of this to Mr. Gladstone, the old statesman of Hawarden tenderly replied:  “Whenever I think now of my dear old friend, I always think only of those days when we were in our warmest fellowship” Among the many other recollections of foreign incidents I must mention a very delightful luncheon at Athens with Dr. Schlieman in his superb house which was filled with the trophies of his exploration of the Troad and Mycenae.  I found him a most genial man; and he told me that he had never surrendered his American citizenship, acquired in 1850.  It was very amusing to hear him and his Grecian wife address their children as “Agamemnon” and “Andromache” and I half expected to see Plato drop in for a chat, or Euripides call with an invitation to witness a rehearsal of the “Medea.”  Athens is to me the most satisfactory of all the restored cities of antiquity, every relic there is so indisputably genuine.  My sunrise view from the Parthenon was a fair match for a midnight view I once had of Olivet and Gethsemane.