i6 FROM EDINBURGH TO THE ANTARCTIC 
to the Waverley just in time to catch the first train to 
Dundee. 
So at last we were fairly en route for the Antarctic, 
possibly the South Pole. 
. . . Dundee, like other towns, is a very ugly blot on the 
beautiful face of Nature. When I left school I had a 
romantic belief that Bonnie Dundee, who died for the 
Royal family at Killiecrankie, was in some way connected 
with the town. But this belief was unfounded, and I have 
not yet learned that it has ever been connected with any 
character so picturesque as the Bonnie Lord Viscount. 
Long ago it used to be considered a safe banking town. 
The soldier burghers of the towns to the south, when they 
shut their shops and went to the borders to fight with the 
English, sent their money-bags to the burghers of Dundee 
for safe keeping ; which was, doubtless, a very good plan. 
The American War is partly responsible for the town 
being what it now is ; before that wajc it was a pleasant, 
quiet-going weaving town and port. The jute fever 
came with the cotton famine, and the small independent 
weavers were brought from the looms in their houses to 
work in big factories. The organisers of the work became 
1 the bloated capitalists ' that we hear so much about, 
and the workers went down, and remain down. I have 
heard an elderly man describe the early days of the 
'city's prosperity,' as they are called — its mushroom 
growth of factories and fortunes, with its stores and flash 
bars, and the noitveanx riches, with their gold and their 
girls ; and it sounded like the rise of a Western mining- 
town rather than the quiet growth of an East Coast seaport. 
