d shelf lying beyond the Grampians along the Moray Firth, where the counties of Aberdeen, Banff, Mor

side and Speyside." One seems driven to indicate this as the district of which Aberdeen is the capital, environed by

n the Tay estuary, and weatherworn sandstone cliffs facing the open sea. We might linger here by notable names beyond Dundee-Arbroath, with its ruined Abbey, the s

ASTLE, KINC

. E. Gladstone's family, which, however, had moved from some Gledstone or "Hawk's rock" in the south of Scotland to make fortunes in England by trade. Sir Thomas, the great Liberal's brother, was a sound C

e us call it, Brae-riach, Cairntoul, the Peak of Cairngorm, Ben-a-bourd, and Ben A'an, heads of the grandest mountain mass in the British Isles. This is the native heath of sturdy Highland stocks, Farquharsons, Macphersons, and M'Hardys, Durwards, Coutts, and Stuarts, of whose exploits and traditions more than one book has been written. The folklorist will not be surprised to find how the legends of Braemar re-echo those of other lands. Here a crafty female Ulysses disables a giant and plays off on him a joking name

etaste of so many violent ends. Malcolm Canmore, son of Duncan, had a seat at Braemar, where he often lived with his Saxon wife. He is said to have founded the autumn gathering, now tamed into a spick and span show of holiday Highlanders, but in old days a grand hunting party, more than once an asse

oss, 'mongst frogs

liffs and thunde

ks, roes are chas

hunting foursco

ports are low a

mes and minds a

generation later had Captain Waverley for eye-witness, that Mar hatche

may rue th

ing of t

timent remained strong in the district up to our own time. In 1824 was buried at Castleton Peter Grant, who passed for being 110 years old, and probably the last survivor of Culloden. To his dying day he would never drink the Hanoverian king's health, yet this constancy seems somewhat marred by the fact that, like Dr. Johnson, he accepted a pension from the usurping line. In our time all devotion to memories of Prince Charlie have been transferred to the sovereign lady who h

n the promised elysium of socialism both palaces and prisons may be turned into hydropathics; and Braemar, 1000 feet above the sea, makes a princely health resort, with no want of water. But access to this backwater of travel is itself somewhat prohibitive to the strangers who would scamper over Scotland in six days. The railway from Aberdeen comes no farther up the Dee than Ballater. The direct access to Castleton is that of a long coach drive by the Spittal of Glenshee. Pedestrians have the best of it in rough tramps up Glen T

AND LOCHNAGAR

mbing "thy summit, O Morven of snow," and getting cheerfully

akes it more of a popular resort. On the other side of the river are the chalybeate wells of Pananich, one of those unfamed spas held in observance by country folk all over Scotland. It was at a farmhouse here that Byron spent his Aberdeen school holidays; and happy should be the schoolboy who can follow in his steps, forgetting examinations and cricket averages. But alas! for the Aberdeen citizen who, on trades' holidays, seeks this lovely scene when it is veiled

ee, between whose mouths it almost touches the sands, and golf and sea bathing are among its pleasures, while in an hour the Deeside railway runs one up into the Highlands. The old town has here dwindled to a suburb, the new one laid out with striking regularity and solidity, re

nd thrawnness; the Edinburgh man cracks upon it the same sort of jokes as the Cockney upon Scotland in general. The accent and dialect of this corner, strongly flavoured with Norse origin and sharp sea-breezes, are quite peculiar. Norse origin, I have said-and this has been held the main stock; but a recent anthropological examination seems to show that even in seaward Buchan only a mino

Dripping Cave of Slains for famous points, till lately much out of the way of travel, but now a railway opens the golf links of Cruden Bay, between the old and the new Slains Castles, whose lord, as Boswell observed, has the king of Denmark for nearest north-eastern neighbour to the High Constable of Scotlan

o say enemies, the Forbes. Yet, "in spite of spite," one must admit that the Gordons flourish here, as on their native borderland, in Poland, in Russia, indeed all over the world. The "Cock of the North" has cause not to crow s

has the subterranean passage of tradition, explored by so many a piper, whose strains were heard dying away underfoot till they went silent in what uncanny world! Near Gicht, Fyvie Castle contains a secret chamber which must not be opened on pain of the laird's death, and a stone that weeps for any approaching calamity to his house. There came a new laird from London, a man of metropolitan scepticism, nay, even a teetotaller, who regaled his scandalised neighbours with zoedone and such like. He was report

L, ABER

med to ye!" Another family in this district is believed, and believes itself, never to have thriven since its head was cursed by a Macdonald

s William Alexander, who, risen from herd loon to editor of an Aberdeen paper, knew his countryfolk thoroughly, and depicted them with an art that never oversteps the modesty of nature. One can hardly press Johnny Gibb on a stranger, weighted as he is with an uncouth dialect and with a serious stiffening of Disruption principles. But, to my mind, if Dr. John Brown had not written Rab and his Friends, William Alexander's Life among my ain Folk would be the flower of the kailyard: a collection of

was Presbyterian divines who, after the Revolution Settlement, had sometimes to be inducted at the bayonet's point upon unwilling parishioners; then Cumberland's soldiers marching to Culloden could find plenty of sport in burning non-juring meeting-houses. The Roman Catholic element is still strong also, especially in the Highland part, many of the clans, from Aberdeen across to Skye, having stuck to the old faith. The Frasers have two heads, him of the Lovat branch a Catholic, but h

o situated and sheltered as to be more genial than most of England. Forres, which Shakespeare vainly imagined as a bleak and blasted heath "fit for murders, treasons, stratagems," has in fact the mean climate of London, cooler in summer, warmer in winter

den spates now pressed up in a gorge a few feet wide, then making a bore-like wave on such a dark basin as that of the old Bridge of Dulsie, "shut in by grey and fantastic rocks, surmounted with the greenest of grass swards, with clumps of the ancient weeping birches with their gnarled and twisted stems, backed again by the dark pine trees. The river here forms a succession of very black and deep pools, connected with each other by foaming and whirling falls and currents, up which in the fine, pure evenings you may see salmon making curious leaps." Another notable reach shows the grounds of Altyre with its heronry. From these wooded gorges, so rich in finned and feathered life, the river emerges on a tamer plain,

ms to have been the noblest Cathedral in Scotland, violated by wild Highlandmen when this lowland strip too much invited plunder

ASS, INVE

, Nairn, which a Scots king boasted for so long as to have one end in the Highlands, the other in the Lowlands, is now able to hold itself up as the

age in the Highlands, a hundred feet or so higher than Buxton, and with a chalybeate well that would work fashionable cures if it could only get a London doctor to patronise it, while the sub-Alpine site and the mainly Catholic population might help to give an illusion of Swillingheim-am-Fluss or Argent les Eaux. A very illustrious author expressed the picturesqueness of Tomintoul by calli

son who married

ta Flood, by dri

have done, I ve

e been only h

hen, his song turned out a sermon. In other respects Banff may pose as a homespun Arcadia. Some twenty years ago, when I knew it, there were not thirty policemen in the whole county, and the county town was hard put to it to confine prisoners for a single night. The only familiar crime was that wont to be solemnly indicted before the Sheriff as "Making a great noise, opposite, or nearly opposite the Free Church Manse, cursing and swearing, and challenging to fight," i.e. in the blunter English of southern police courts, being drunk and disorderly; then it would be a point of legal acumen not to fine the almost always repentantly avowing offender more than he was likely to have at command. The authorities stood in dread that some Englishman or

and opposite, I have known the ladies of a family leave their bathing dress hanging over the hedge by the roadside for weeks together. It was only on the grand and gallant scale that John Highlandman made a confusion between meum and tuum. But a distinctly litigious disposi

n only high treason was withheld from the jurisdiction of these private Solons. Then they lost power to adjudicate in the "four pleas of the crown,"-murder, rape, robbery, and arson, unless in the case of the slayer taken red-hand or the thief infang with the stolen property in his possession within the barony bounds. So late as 1707 Lord Drummond was good enough to "lend" his executioner to the city of Perth. After Culloden, hereditary judges like the Baron of Bradwardine were wholly deprived of the right of furca et fossa, the dro

nty court judge is doubled by the she

GRAMPIANS, I

, an elected constable in an American one, but a paid and permanent judge north of the Tweed! The shire reeves here were in feudal times hereditary lieutenants of the Crown, who, as the baron handed over judicial authority to his clerkly bailie, appointed legal representatives, still entitled Sheriffs Depute, also known as Sheriffs Principal, as they have come to be. These well-paid offices are prizes of the bar, held by successful advocates in Edinburgh, who only in special cases or by

rivate hands, but are conducted by a public official. The Procurator-Fiscal is the Attorney-General of the Sheriff's Court, also performing the duties of Coroner without the meddling of a jury or reporters, though in late years public inquests in certain cases of death have been introduced into Scottish practice. Petty offenders are disposed of by the Sheriff off-hand. More serious charges he remits to the consideration of the Crown officers in Edi

as south of the Border, the administration of the law here has come to be notably mild. Executions are rare, as, indeed, are cases of premeditated murder. In criminal trials, a Scottish jury numbers fifteen, and their verdict is that of th

Another turns up the Spey, and by this beautiful strath would bring us into the heart of the Highlands. The Speyside line considerately does not hurry passengers through its picturesque environments. There is a legend about this railway that the town council of Elgin-no wiser i

the prophet, 'many shall run to and fro'?" As if exhausted by its unusual burden, the train stopped some couple of hours at Craigellachie, giving one time to make a "Spey cast," but for the want of license and tackle. At the end of nearly a day's journey from Banff, I reached the Boat of Garten, too late for any southward train that evening. Like other "boats" and "bridges" of the Highlands, this has a snug little inn, enlarged I fancy since then, when it had only one good bedroom, in which more than one crowned head has lain t