370 A Walk from 



view. The baronet is regarded as an eccentric man, 

 perhaps chiefly because he has built a splendid Roman 

 Catholic chapel quite near to his mansion and supports 

 a priest of that order mostly for his own spiritual good. 

 Near Dunkeld, Birnam Hill lifts its round, dark, bushy 

 head to the height of over 1,500 feet, grand and grim, 

 as if it wore the bonnet of Macbeth and hid his dagger 

 beneath its tartan cloak of firs. "Birnam Wood," 

 which Shakespeare's genius has made one of the im- 

 mortals among earthly localities, was the setting of 

 that hill in his day, and perhaps centuries before it. 

 Crossing the Tay by a magnificent bridge, you are 

 in the famous old city and capital of ancient Caledonia, 

 Dunkeld. Here centre some of the richest rivulets 

 of Scotch history, ecclesiastical and military, of church 

 and state, cowl and crown. Walled in here, on the 

 upper waters of the Tay, by dark and heavily-wooded 

 mountains, it was just the place for the earliest monks 

 to select as the site of one of their cloistered commu- 

 nities. The two best saints ever produced by these 

 islands, St. Columba and St. Cuthbert, are said to 

 have been connected with the religious foundations of 

 this little sequestered city. The old cathedral, having 

 been knocked about like other Roman Catholic edifices 

 in the sledge-hammer crusades of the Reformation, was 

 ruined very picturesquely, as a tourist, with one of 



