Penelope's Experiences in Scotland. Wiggin Kate Douglas Smith

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      “You can play that you are one of the famous ‘licht Lindsays,’ and you can look up the particular ancestor in your big book. Now, Francesca, it’s your turn!”

      “I am American to the backbone,” she declared, with insufferable dignity. “I do not desire any foreign ancestors.”

      “Francesca!” I expostulated. “Do you mean to tell me that you can dine with a lineal descendant of Sir Fitzroy Donald Maclean, Baronet, of Duart and Morven, and not make any effort to trace your genealogy back further than your parents?”

      “If you goad me to desperation,” she answered, “I will wear an American flag in my hair, declare that my father is a Red Indian, or a pork-packer, and talk about the superiority of our checking system and hotels all the evening. I don’t want to go, any way. It is sure to be stiff and ceremonious, and the man who takes me in will ask me the population of Chicago and the amount of wheat we exported last year,—he always does.”

      “I can’t see why he should,” said I. “I am sure you don’t look as if you knew.”

      “My looks have thus far proved no protection,” she replied sadly. “Salemina is so flexible, and you are so dramatic, that you enter into all these experiences with zest. You already more than half believe in that Tam o’ the Cowgate story. But there’ll be nothing for me in Edinburgh society; it will be all clergymen—”

      “Ministers” interjected Salemina,—“all ministers and professors. My Redfern gowns will be unappreciated, and my Worth evening frocks worse than wasted!”

      “There are a few thousand medical students,” I said encouragingly, “and all the young advocates, and a sprinkling of military men—they know Worth frocks.”

      “And,” continued Salemina bitingly, “there will always be, even in an intellectual city like Edinburgh, a few men who continue to escape all the developing influences about them, and remain commonplace, conventional manikins, devoted to dancing and flirting. Never fear, they will find you!”

      This sounds harsh, but nobody minds Salemina, least of all Francesca, who well knows that she is the apple of that spinster’s eye. But at this moment Susanna opens the door (timorously, as if there might be a panther behind it) and announces the cab (in the same tone in which she would announce the beast); we pick up our draperies, and are whirled off by the lamiter to dine with the Scottish nobility.

      Chapter VI. Edinburgh society, past and present

        ‘Wha last beside his chair shall fa’

         He is the king amang us three!’

      It was the Princess Dashkoff who said, in the latter part of the eighteenth century, that of all the societies of men of talent she had met with in her travels, Edinburgh’s was the first in point of abilities.

      One might make the same remark to-day, perhaps, and not depart widely from the truth. One does not find, however, as many noted names as are associated with the annals of the Cape and Poker Clubs or the Crochallan Fencibles, those famous groups of famous men who met for relaxation (and intoxication, I should think) at the old Isle of Man Arms or in Dawney’s Tavern in the Anchor Close. These groups included such shining lights as Robert Fergusson the poet, and Adam Ferguson the historian and philosopher, Gavin Wilson, Sir Henry Raeburn, David Hume, Erskine, Lords Newton, Gillies, Monboddo, Hailes, Kames, Henry Mackenzie, and the Ploughman Poet himself, who has kept alive the memory of the Crochallans in many a jovial verse like that in which he describes Smellie, the eccentric philosopher and printer:—

      or in the characteristic picture of William Dunbar, a wit of the time, and the merriest of the Fencibles:—

      or in the verses on Creech, Burns’s publisher, who left Edinburgh for a time in 1789. The ‘Willies,’ by the way, seem to be especially inspiring to the Scottish balladists.

      I think perhaps the gatherings of the present time are neither quite as gay nor quite as brilliant as those of Burns’s day, when

      but the ideal standard of those meetings seems to be voiced in the lines:—

      As they sit in their chairs nowadays to the very end of the feast, there is doubtless joined with modern sobriety a soupcon of modern dulness and discretion.

      To an American the great charm of Edinburgh is its leisurely atmosphere: ‘not the leisure of a village arising from the deficiency of ideas and motives, but the leisure of a city reposing grandly on tradition and history; which has done its work, and does not require to weave its own clothing, to dig its own coals, or smelt its own iron.’

      We were reminded of this more than once, and it never failed to depress us properly. If one had ever lived in Pittsburg, Fall River, or Kansas City, I should think it would be almost impossible to maintain self-respect in a place like Edinburgh, where the citizens ‘are released from the vulgarising dominion of the hour.’ Whenever one of Auld Reekie’s great men took this tone with me, I always felt as though I were the germ in a half-hatched egg, and he were an aged and lordly cock gazing at me pityingly through my shell. He, lucky creature, had lived through all the struggles which I was to undergo; he, indeed, was released from ‘the vulgarising dominion of the hour’; but I, poor thing, must grow and grow, and keep pecking at my shell, in order to achieve existence.

      Sydney Smith says in one of his letters, ‘Never shall I forget the happy days passed there [in Edinburgh], amidst odious smells, barbarous sounds, bad suppers, excellent hearts, and the most enlightened and cultivated understandings.’ His only criticism of the conversation of that day (1797-1802) concerned itself with the prevalence of that form of Scotch humour which was called wut; and with the disputations and dialectics. We were more fortunate than Sydney Smith, because Edinburgh has outgrown its odious smells, barbarous sounds, and bad suppers and, wonderful to relate, has kept its excellent hearts and its enlightened and cultivated understandings. As for mingled wut and dialectics, where can one find a better foundation for dinner-table conversation?

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