"My native land, good night."
Lord Byron.
In the present day, a journey from Edinburgh to London is a matter at once safe,
brief, and simple, however inexperienced or unprotected the traveller. Numerous
coaches of different rates of charge, and as many packets, are perpetually
passing and repassing betwixt the capital of Britain and her northern sister, so
that the most timid or indolent may execute such a journey upon a few hours'
notice. But it was different in 1737. So slight and infrequent was the intercourse
betwixt London and Edinburgh, that men still alive remember that upon one
occasion the mail from the former city arrived at the General Post-Office in
Scotland with only one letter in it.*
* The fact is certain. The single epistle was addressed to the principal director of
the British Linen Company.
The usual mode of travelling was by means of post-horses, the traveller
occupying one, and his guide another, in which manner, by relays of horses from
stage to stage, the journey might be accomplished in a wonderfully short time by
those who could endure fatigue. To have the bones shaken to pieces by a
constant change of those hacks was a luxury for the rich--the poor were under
the necessity of using the mode of conveyance with which nature had provided
them.
With a strong heart, and a frame patient of fatigue, Jeanie Deans, travelling at
the rate of twenty miles a-day, and sometimes farther, traversed the southern
part of Scotland, and advanced as far as Durham.
Hitherto she had been either among her own country-folk, or those to whom her
bare feet and tartan screen were objects too familiar to attract much attention.
But as she advanced, she perceived that both circumstances exposed her to
sarcasm and taunts, which she might otherwise have escaped; and although in
her heart she thought it unkind, and inhospitable, to sneer at a passing stranger
on account of the fashion of her attire, yet she had the good sense to alter those
parts of her dress which attracted ill-natured observation. Her chequed screen
was deposited carefully in her bundle, and she conformed to the national
extravagance of wearing shoes and stockings for the whole day. She confessed
afterwards, that, "besides the wastrife, it was lang or she could walk sae
comfortably with the shoes as without them; but there was often a bit saft heather
by the road-side, and that helped her weel on." The want of the screen, which
was drawn over the head like a veil, she supplied by a bon-grace, as she called
it; a large straw bonnet like those worn by the English maidens when labouring in
