IF

THE ENTERKIN.

you have a holiday, and can trust your aneroid when it promises fair-if you can do twenty-one miles in seven hours, and wish, moreover, to see what you never saw before, and what you will never forget then take six brown biscuits in your pocket, and a return ticket to Abington, on the Caledonian, starting at 6.20 A.M.

There is not much from Edinburgh to Abington that everybody does not know; but as you pass Kirknewton you will not be the worse of remembering that the beautiful little wooded glen-' dingle or bushy dell or bosky bourne -on the left, into whose recesses you get a brief, surreptitious glimpse, with the young Gogar trotting cheerily through it, is the once famous 'PROCUL NEGOTIIS' of the great philosophic physician Dr. Cullen, where it was his delight to walk, and muse, and delve. You may see the maze of his walks still. It was part of his little estate of Ormiston Hill. Behind the present handsome and sensible mansion the old house may still be seen, with its magnificent outlook across the Vale of the

Almond to the Ochils, and the outlying Grampians from Benlomond to Schiehallion, and across the Firth to Benarty and the Lomonds; above its door are the words 'EST ULUBRIS,' from the well-known lines:

'Cœlum, non animum, mutant qui trans mare currunt ;
Strenua nos exercet inertia : navibus atque

Quadrigis petimus bene vivere. Quod petis, hic est ;
Est Ulubris, animus si te non deficit æquus.'

This is untranslateable, but we give its bones: 'It is clime not character they change, who run across the sea; a strenuous idleness keeps us at work; in our yachts and "drags" we seek a happy life. What you seek is here. Even in this our Ulubræ-our own homely out-of-the-way Ormiston Hill, if we but bring with us the even mind.' It is pleasant to think of this great old Doctor, leaving his town work and books, and giving himself up to gardening-the records of which, in outlandish plants and shrubs, still remain—and to farming, testing those original speculations as to soils and manures which he expounded in his lectures on chemistry, and which were in much anticipatory of the new doctrines and practice. You may-to while away the time past Carnwath and its dreary Lang Whang-fancy the old Doctor, as Dr. Benjamin Rush sketches him— 'tall and slender, and with a stoop in his shoulders, his face long, his under lip protruded a little beyond

the upper, his nose large and inclined to a point downwards, his eye of a blue colour, penetrating but soft, and on his whole face an air of mildness and thought' -walking in his glen, and repeating to himself or to a friend his favourite beatitude of the old usurer'Beatus ille qui procul negotiis,' etc., or that of Politian :

:

'Felix ille animi, divisque simillimus ipsis,
Quem non mendaci resplendens gloria fuco
Solicitat, non fastosi mala gaudia luxus.
Sed tacitos sinit ire dies, et paupere cultu
Exigit innocuæ tranquilla silentia vitæ.'

We are glad, by the by, to learn that that our College of Physicians is about to repair the tomb of this, one of their greatest fellows; it is in the old buryingground of Kirknewton, and had fallen sadly into ruin and forgetfulness.

We are now past Carnwath, and got to that station which a shivering Cockney, who was kept waiting some hours on a windy winter night in the old shed, said was well-named Curst airs (Carstairs), and past Thankerton-Tancred's Town-and SymingtonSymon's and are at Abington before nine. There is Mrs. Hunter's comfortable little roadside inn, where, in the Eglinton Tournament year, the present Emperor of the French arrived one evening alone, wet, hungry, and weary, having been grouse-shooting all day on Crawford Muir. He asked for a room,

but was told the only one was occupied by some young men who were surveying the Caledonian line. He sent up his card asking to be allowed to join them, and was requested to go to the place whence Mr. Kinglake seems to think his Majesty has a return ticket. He sat down by the kitchen fire, got his supper, slipped away to bed, and was off early next morning on foot.

You now take the road to Leadhills by the Glengonar Burn, which, like the river Pison in the Eden of Genesis, 'compasses the land where there is gold.' Indeed this region was called in olden times 'God's treasure-house in Scotland,' and the four petty burns in which the precious yellow grains were foundGlengonar, Short Cleuch, Mennock, and Wanlock— were compared to the four rivers in the Garden of the Lord-Pison, Gihon, Hiddekel, and Euphrates! Here was got the gold of which King James's bonnetpieces were made, hundreds of workmen being then employed in its search. The glittering sand is still occasionally to be found, and every now and then a miner, smit with the sacred hunger, takes to the deluding, feckless work, and seldom settles to anything again.

It is six miles of a pleasant glen road from Abington to Leadhills-a dreary, unexpected little townwhich has lain great part in ruins for many years, owing to the suspension or spiritless working of the