It is not race.  Look at us.  One is Norse, one Celtic, and another Saxon.  It is not community of tongue.  We have it not among ourselves; and we have it almost to perfection, with English, or Irish, or American.  It is no tie of faith, for we detest each other’s errors.  And yet somewhere, deep down in the heart of each one of us, something yearns for the old land, and the old kindly people.

Of all mysteries of the human heart, this is perhaps the most inscrutable.  There is no special loveliness in that gray country, with its rainy, sea-beat archipelago; its fields of dark mountains; its unsightly places, black with coal; its treeless, sour, unfriendly looking corn-lands; its quaint, gray, castled city, where the bells clash of a Sunday, and the wind squalls, and the salt showers fly and beat.  I do not even know if I desire to live there; but let me hear, in some far land, a kindred voice sing out, “Oh, why left I my hame?” and it seems at once as if no beauty under the kind heavens, and no society of the wise and good, can repay me for my absence from my country.  And though I think I would rather die elsewhere, yet in my heart of hearts I long to be buried among good Scots clods.  I will say it fairly, it grows on me with every year:  there are no stars so lovely as Edinburgh street-lamps.  When I forget thee, auld Reekie, may my right hand forget its cunning!

The happiest lot on earth is to be born a Scotchman.  You must pay for it in many ways, as for all other advantages on earth.  You have to learn the paraphrases and the shorter catechism; you generally take to drink; your youth, as far as I can find out, is a time of louder war against society, of more outcry and tears and turmoil, than if you had been born, for instance, in England.  But somehow life is warmer and closer; the hearth burns more redly; the lights of home shine softer on the rainy street; the very names, endeared in verse and music, cling nearer round our hearts.  An Englishman may meet an Englishman to-morrow, upon Chimborazo, and neither of them care; but when the Scotch wine-grower told me of Mons Meg, it was like magic.

“From the dim shieling on the misty island
Mountains divide us, and a world of seas;
Yet still our hearts are true, our hearts are Highland,
And we, in dreams, behold the Hebrides.”

And, Highland and Lowland, all our hearts are Scotch.

Only a few days after I had seen M’Eckron, a message reached me in my cottage.  It was a Scotchman who had come down a long way from the hills to market.  He had heard there was a countryman in Calistoga, and came round to the hotel to see him.  We said a few words to each other; we had not much to say—­should never have seen each other had we stayed at home, separated alike in space and in society; and then we shook hands, and he went his way again to his ranche among the hills, and that was all.

Another Scotchman there was, a resident, who for the more love of the common country, douce, serious, religious man, drove me all about the valley, and took as much interest in me as if I had been his son:  more, perhaps; for the son has faults too keenly felt, while the abstract countryman is perfect—­like a whiff of peats.