I’ve never understood the Scotch.  I think they are, without doubt, the most capable race in the world—­away from home.  But how they came to be so and how they keep up their character and supremacy and keep breeding true needs explanation.  As you come through the country, you see the most monotonous and dingy little houses and thousands of robust children, all dirtier than niggers.  In the fertile parts of the country, the fields are beautifully cultivated—­for Lord This-and-T’Other who lives in London and comes up here in summer to collect his rents and to shoot.  The country people seem desperately poor.  But they don’t lose their robustness.  In the solid cities—­the solidest you ever saw, all being of granite—­such as Edinburgh and Aberdeen, where you see the prosperous class, they look the sturdiest and most independent fellows you ever saw.  As they grow old they all look like blue-bellied Presbyterian elders.  Scotch to the marrow—­everybody and everything seem—­bare knees alike on the street and in the hotel with dress coats on, bagpipes—­there’s no sense in these things, yet being Scotch they live forever.  The first men I saw early this morning on the street in front of the hotel were two weather-beaten old chaps, with gray beards under their chins.  “Guddddd Murrrrninggggg, Andy,” said one.  “Guddddd murrninggggg, Sandy,” said the other; and they trudged on.  They’d dethrone kings before they’d shave differently or drop their burrs and gutturals or cover their knees or cease lying about the bagpipe.  And you can’t get it out of the blood.  Your mother[21] becomes provoked when I say these things, and I shouldn’t wonder if you yourself resent them and break out quoting Burns.  Now the Highlands can’t support a population larger than the mountain counties of Kentucky.  Now your Kentucky feud is a mere disgrace to civilization.  But your Highland feud is celebrated in song and story.  Every clan keeps itself together to this day by its history and by its plaid.  At a turn in the road in the mountains yesterday, there stood a statue of Rob Roy painted every stripe to life.  We saw his sword and purse in Sir Walter’s house at Abbotsford.  The King himself wore the kilt and one of the plaids at the last court ball at Buckingham Palace, and there is a man who writes his name and is called “The Macintosh of Macintosh,” and that’s a prouder title than the King’s.  A little handful of sheep-stealing bandits got themselves immortalized and heroized, and they are now all Presbyterian elders.  They got their church “established” in Scotland, and when the King comes to Scotland, by Jehoshaphat! he is obliged to become a Presbyterian.  Yet your Kentucky feudist—­poor devil—­he comes too late.  The Scotchman has pre-empted that particular field of glory.  And all such comparisons make your mother fighting mad. . . .

     Affectionately,
     W.H.P.