Suddenlywe are over green fields like fancy patch-work, dotted with white farm houses and groups of darker buildings with many chimneys, marking the small villages of the western Scottish Lowlands. Like a dream of the years come true ...there at last was Scotland, the object of our pilgrimage. there to the southward would be the Sir Walter Scott border-lands, below at the very moment the Bobbie Burns country and even now, just to the left, we are sweeping past the lands where eight centuries ago the first Houstons dwelt.

Such was the beginning of a long-planned pilgrimage. From poring over histories, searching libraries, reading strange books long out of print, wading through dim, musty records, I came now to see first-hand, as they are today, the lands, the exact places where the Houston ancestors lived and loved, worked and fought, died and were buried in graves now obliterated by the lapse of time.

Now we were landing at Prestwick, remembered by many American airmen, doubtless Houstons among them, as a base of operations during World War II. We are quickly through customs and riding by airfield coach through the lovely green countryside, past lush fields of barley and oats (corn to the Scots) and pastures dotted by wool-laden sheep and dairy cows with full pink udders.

We passed neat, prosperous-looking farmsteads with modern farm machines and met streams of compact cars on the