ix CARLYLE'S COUNTRY 49 



its brink eastward again, the ground slopes in a 

 broad expanse of greensward to a valley called 

 Hunter's Bog, where I thought the hunters were 

 very quiet and very numerous until I saw they were 

 city riflemen engaged in target practice; thence it 

 rises irregularly to the crest of Arthur's Seat, form- 

 ing the pastoral eminence and green-shining disk to 

 which I have referred. Along the crest of Salis- 

 bury Crags the thick turf comes to the edge of the 

 precipices, as one might stretch a carpet. It is so 

 firm and compact that the boys cut their initials in 

 it, on a large scale, with their jack-knives, as in 

 the bark of a tree. Arthur's Seat was a favorite 

 walk of Carlyle's during those gloomy days in Edin- 

 burgh in 1820-21. It was a mount of vision to 

 him, and he apparently went there every day when 

 the weather permitted. 1 



There was no road in Scotland or in England 

 which I should have been so glad to walk over as 

 that from Edinburgh to Ecclefechan, a distance 

 covered many times by the feet of him whose birth 

 and burial place I was about to visit. Carlyle as 

 a young man had walked it with Edward Irving 

 (the Scotch say " travel " when they mean going 

 afoot), and he had walked it alone, and as a lad 

 with an elder boy, on his way to Edinburgh college. 

 He says in his " Reminiscences " he nowhere else 

 had such affectionate, sad, thoughtful, and, in fact, 

 interesting and salutary journeys. "No company 

 to you but the rustle of the grass under foot, the 

 i See letter to his brother John, March 9, 1821. 



