We wandered about, following our rheumatic old guide, who pointed out the different apartments to us and, in Scotch so broad that we had to follow him very closely, told us the story of the fortress.  From the windows everywhere was the placid, shimmering summer sea, its surface broken into silvery ripples by the fresh morning wind, but it was left to the imagination to conceive the awful desolation of Dunnottar Castle on a gray and stormy day.  The old man conducted us to the keep, and I looked over a year’s record in the visitors’ book without finding a single American registered, and was more than ever impressed as to the manner in which the motor car will often bring the tourist from the States into a comparatively undiscovered country.  The high tower of the keep, several hundred feet above the sea, afforded scope for a most magnificent outlook.  One could get a full sweep of the bleak and sterile country through which we had passed, lying between Aberdeen and Stonehaven, and which Scott celebrated as the Muir of Drumthwacket.  It was with a feeling of relief that we passed out of the forbidding portals into the fresh air of the pleasant July day, leaving the old custodian richer by a few shillings, to wonder that the “American Invasion” had reached this secluded old fortress on the wild headland washed by the German Ocean.

From Stonehaven we passed without special incident to Montrose, following an excellent but rather uninteresting road, though an occasional fishing-village and frequent view of the ocean broke the monotony of the flying miles.  Montrose is an ancient town delightfully situated between the ocean and a great basin connected with the sea by a broad strait, over which a suspension bridge five hundred feet long carried us southward.  I recall that it was at Montrose where an obliging garage man loaned me an “accumulator”—­my batteries had been giving trouble—­scouting the idea of a deposit, and I gave him no more than my agreement to return his property when I reached Edinburgh.

At Arbroath are the ruins of the most extensive of the Scotch abbeys, scanty indeed, but still enough to show its state and importance in the “days of faith.”  Here once reigned the good abbott celebrated by Southey in his ballad of Ralph the Rover, familiar to every schoolboy.  Ten miles off the coast is the reef where

    “The abbott of Aberbrothok
    Had placed a bell on the Inchcape rock. 
    Like a buoy in the storm it floated and swung,
    And over the waves its warning rung.”

And where the pirate, out of pure malice, “To vex the abbott of Aberbrothok,” cut the bell from its buoy only to be lost himself on the reef a year later.  The abbey was founded by William the Lion in 1178, but war, fire and fanaticism have left it sadly fragmentary.  Now it is the charge of the town, but the elements continue to war upon it and the brittle red sandstone of which it is built shows deeply the wear of the sea wind.