Now as we headed up the loch, I got a fresh view of this land, which had been my home for so many years. Out of the mist, headland behind headland plunged down into the deeps. In the tortured rock fissures far below, there was room for any sort of life. I knew of one diver who had gone down some distance, come back to the surface and refused to go down again, though he would not say why.

Even in the translucent waters of the sea, long before one reaches the 900 feet of Loch Ness, red, orange, yellow, green, and violet have in turn disappeared, leaving only a blackish blueness. In the deeper parts of the opaque waters of Loch Ness, there must be perpetual night.

But when Professor Beebe the other year went down in his bathysphere to a depth of 3,000 feet he still found life, although a life of which we had hitherto not even dreamed. Schools of luminous fish in the absolute darkness; strange monsters lit up as a ship is seen lit up through its portholes.

We know little of the living marvels of the deep, and when we have rigged up a bathysphere (a steel ball with a small window), complete with telephone and electric beam after the Beebe model, to take us to the bottom of Loch Ness, we may be able at least to provide a new thrill for our tourists, some sort of alternative to the Well of the Heads. Always assuming we could first overcome the more difficult matter of arranging landlord rights by getting royalties per peep fixed at a reasonable figure.

And now through the haze arose the ruins of Urquhart Castle. Edward First, that old hammer of the Scots, had actually laid siege to it. He probably had had the luck to get good weather. And in any case would have ravaged all he could for his comfort. When Edward got hold of Scots he did the only completely satisfying thing with this bad brood: he killed them. Wallace saw the perfect logic in this, and so when there were Englishmen within his reach, he slew them to a man. And if Edward got as far as Urquhart Castle, Wallace got as far as St. Albans. But Wallace hadn’t the real royal logic in him through and through. The old Celtic stock of the Cuchulains and the King Arthurs (from whom he had the misfortune to be descended) had that drooling pathetic regard, yclept chivalry, for women and children, and even for priests, that is about as remote from high statesmanship as Beebe’s bathysphere. So Edward stuck Wallace’s head on top of his Traitor’s Gate and distributed his limbs throughout his kingdom for all to see. When chivalry is carried beyond the ladies’ coloured ribbons of the jousts (whence our school ties), it does no more than provide some ditchside old poet with a theme, as he scratches the thigh of a verminous poverty.

Yet they continued to have great wallops at each other, the English and the Scots, and are inclined to have a sly one still when the chance offers, though it looks at last as though the English have got the Scots where and how they want them, helped nowadays by, the proletarian dream, as personified in the Clydeside communist, which happily lifts us far above consideration of paltry national issues. We are all Englishmen now.