CHAPTEE 11. 



Autumnal Tints — Solomon and the Queen of Sheba — Sortes Sacra! — Sortes VirgUiana — 

 Charles the First and Lord Falkland — Virgilius the Magician — Thomas of Ercildoune. 



With occasional gales of wind and blustering showers [October 

 1868], that, from their chilliness and snellness, you suspect to be 

 sleet, although you don't like as yet exactly to say so — meteorological 

 phenomena, however, in no way strange or unusual on the back of the 

 autumnal equinox — the weather with us here continues delightfully 

 bright and breezy, and the country looks beautiful. Field and upland 

 are still as freshly green as at midsummer, while the deep, rich russet 

 hues and golden tints of the declining year, gleaming in the fitful 

 sunlight, and intermingling their glories with the stiU beautifully 

 fresh and unspotted foliage of our hardier trees and shrubs ; with 

 the ripe, ruddy bloom of the heather empurpling the moorland and 

 the hill, and a perfect sea of " brackens brown " mantling the 

 mountain side, and fringing, in loving companionship with the 

 birch, the alder, and the hazel, the torrent's brink, as it leaps in 

 foam from rock to rock and dashes downwards with its wild music 

 to the sea, — all this, with a thousand indescribable accessories, 

 scarcely perceptible indeed in the general effect, but all bearing 

 their fitting part in the delightful whole, presents at this season, 

 and never more markedly than this year, a scene that you never 

 tire of gazing at, and declaring again and again, and with nil your 

 heart, to be "beautiful exceedingly." As you gnze on such a scene 

 as this, you feel that no painter could paint it ; that there is a 

 something in it all too subtile and spiritual to be transferred 



