as we drove by.



CHAPTER IV--THE SCOT ABROAD



A few pages back, I wrote that a man belonged, in these days, to a
variety of countries; but the old land is still the true love, the
others are but pleasant infidelities. Scotland is indefinable; it
has no unity except upon the map. Two languages, many dialects,
innumerable forms of piety, and countless local patriotisms and
prejudices, part us among ourselves more widely than the extreme
east and west of that great continent of America. When I am at
home, I feel a man from Glasgow to be something like a rival, a man
from Barra to be more than half a foreigner. Yet let us meet in
some far country, and, whether we hail from the braes of Manor or
the braes of Mar, some ready-made affection joins us on the
instant. 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;