IN 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.^ 



There was no road in Scotland or England which 

 I should have been so glad to have walked over as 

 that from Edinburgh to Ecclef echan, — 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 

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



