Tan cloth binding with gilt title on the spine and front board.

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A lively book

The chief of these fishing towns is Anstruther, with its neighbour, Cellardyke. Anstruther is a much bigger place than St. Monans or Pittenweem, and with its spacious harbour forms the great rallying place for herring-boats all round the Firth. Here are the big fish-curing yards, sailmakers, rope-makers, places for barking nets, and all the other various industries connected with the trade. Characteristic too, the buildings round the harbour are much less picturesque than in the two smaller towns, for they are more modern, a sure sign of prosperity. Anstruther has, however, a history stretching far into the past. Dreel Castle, the old seat of the Anstruthers, just overhanging the harbour, could tell many tales, one of which concerning how the house of Anstruther came by its coat of arms, must take a place on our stage by itself, as a fine old-world melodrama. Away back in the days of Robert 1st. Sir William Anstruther lived at Dreel Castle with his only daughter Margaret. “Fisher Willie” he is called, for he loved to spend his time on the Firth, a scourge to the pirates there, and, if truth be told, a thorn in the side of neighbours, towards whom he was not well disposed. The daughter, in all the bloom of her youth, tall and slender, with golden hair and deep blue eyes, is the pride of the countryside. She is just home from a prolonged stay at the Court, where, though her fond father little knows it, her heart has been captured by the gay and debonair Patrick Home, the son of the Earl of Home. But there is trouble brewing here, for the two families have been bitter enemies since the days when a Home slew Sir William’s grandfather in a fight on the Firth.

The Pageant of the Forth: From the East Neuk to the Bass it is some twelve miles across, and this great stretch of water extends with little diminution of its breadth right up to the port Of Leith there the Shores begin to draw in, and a few miles farther up we come to the narrow strait between North and South Queensferry. Above, the Firth broadens again in the land-locked haven, soon to be the rendezvous of a great part of our fleet, and twelve miles farther up, the river begins.