To modern Scone we could come on that side by a tramway which is turning this goodly village into a suburb of Perth. Even when we get into the Highlands we shall find how the squalid “Tullyveolans” and “Glenburnies” have been improved away generations ago. At the gates of great proprietors, at all events, a Scottish village usually compares well with an English one in point of comfort if not of picturesqueness. The former commonly wears an air of stiff neatness and coldness toned by its grey stone walls and slated roofs; the hand of the laird and factor is seen over it all, and only here and there are left such wigwam makeshifts as might still move Waverley’s disgust in the poverty-stricken Hebrides. The Southern village, even if a model one, is apt to be more taking to the eye, with its show of warm brick scattered among the green, its unstudied variety of thatched and lichened roofs, of gabled, plastered, and half-timbered walls, where paddocks and gardens divide an age-mellowed block of farm buildings from a row of picturesquely decayed hovels; and over all rises the tower or spire of some much-patched church, neighboured by a smug chapel that throws the ancient fane into striking relief. The churches of Scotland make no such points of dignity, as a rule; but their old austerity now often becomes relaxed by more ambitious architecture of Anglican-aping days; and here and there has been spared some stout hull that weathered the Reformation storms.
One feature of a northern parish seems past praying for. The churchyard, if not miserably neglected, is apt to look grim, dismal, forbidding, in contrast with those flowery God’s acres of a less stern faith, that sometimes tempt poor human nature to be half in love with death. As a child I remember my nurse, and she was an Englishwoman, pointing out to me for reprobation what seemed the Popish sacrilege of a wreath laid upon a grave. Such Protestant superstition has been broken down in the last half-century. Large towns, even so long ago, had more or less ornamentally laid-out cemeteries, which were allowed to be the goal of a Sabbath walk. But still, in out-of-the-way parts, the disposition is not to mantle the king of terrors in any sentimental disguise; and weeds may be more common than flowers about tombstones that give lessons of warning rather than of consolation. The memorials of the dead are oftenest plain and practical, like the homes of the living, whose very gardens run rather to kail and berries than to flowers. Yet where a Scotsman’s time is less taken up by wringing a bare subsistence from his poor soil, he can treat himself to the luxury of bloom; his grey walls are more and more lit by hardy creepers; and on heathery slopes you may see cottages covered with gay tropæolum, which I cannot coax to flourish on a London balcony.