IN CARLYLE'S COUNTRY. 55 



Palisades of the Hudson. From its brink eastward 

 again, the ground slopes in a broad expanse of green- 

 sward 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 prac- 

 tice ; thence it rises irregularly to the crest of Arthur 

 Seat, forming the pastoral eminence and green-shining 

 disk to which I have referred. Along the crest of 

 Salisbury 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 Seat was a favorite walk 

 of Carlyle's during those gloomy days in Edinburgh 

 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 England which 

 I should have been so glad to have walked over as 

 ;hat from Edinburgh to Ecclefechan, a distance 

 'overed many times by the feet of him whose birth 

 md burial place I was about to visit. Carlyle as a 

 r oung man had walked it with Edward Irving (the 

 vScotch 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 

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



