Page:Letters from England.djvu/114

 The Scottish Sunday is even worse than the English one, and the Scottish religious services evoke the conception of infinity. The pastors wear prickly moustaches, and are neither so rosy nor so bland as the Anglican clergy. Throughout Scotland on Sunday the trains stop running, the railway stations are closed and nothing whatever is done; I am surprised that the very clocks do not stop. Only the wind crinkles the livid and steely lakes between the bare domes of the hills; it was on such a lake that I went sailing until my boat landed on a sandbank, so I laid aside my pen and went wandering along the wistful pathways between the wire fences.

And there was displayed to me another Scotland beneath grey skies; bare and straggling glens with ruined stone huts, stone walls ranging along the hill-sides, for miles and miles scarcely a single stone cottage, and even that seemingly uninhabited, here and there fields of oats with a finger-high crop—all the rest only bracken and stones and tough grass