Chapter II: Part 2

May is an exciting month in Edinburgh, for, towards its close, the Assemblies of the Established and Free Churches meet. For a fortnight or so the clerical element predominates in the city. Every presbytery in Scotland sends up its representative to the metropolis, and an astonishing number of black coats and white neckcloths flit about the streets. At high noon the gaiety of Princes Street is subdued with innumerable suits of sable. Ecclesiastical newspapers let the world wag as it pleases, so intent are they on the debates. Rocky-featured elders from the far north come up interested in some kirk dispute; and junior counsel waste the midnight oil preparing for appearance at the bar of the House. The opening of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland is attended with a pomp and circumstance which seems a little at variance with Presbyterian quietude of tone and contempt of sacerdotal vanities. Her Majesty's Lord High Commissioner resides at Holyrood, and on the morning of the day on which the Assembly opens he holds his first levee. People rush to warm themselves in the dim reflection of the royal sunshine, and return with faces happy and elate. On the morning the Assembly opens, the military line the streets from Holyrood to the Assembly Hall. A regimental band and a troop of lancers wait outside the palace gates while the procession is slowly getting itself into order. The important moment at length arrives. The Commissioner has taken his seat in the carriage. Out bursts the brass band, piercing every ear; the lancers caracole; an orderly rides with eager spur; the long train of carriages begins to crawl forward in an intermittent manner, with many a dreary pause. At last the head of the procession appears along the peopled way. First come, in hired carriages, the city councillors, clothed in scarlet robes, and with cocked hats upon their heads. The very mothers that bore them could not recognise them now. They pass on silent with dignity. Then comes a troop of halberdiers in mediæval costume, and looking for all the world as if the Kings, Jacks, and Knaves had walked out of a pack of cards. Then comes a carriage full of magistrates, wearing their gold chains of office over their scarlet cloaks, and eyeing sternly the small boy in the crowd who, from a natural sense of humour, has given vent to an irreverent observation. Then comes the band; then a squadron of lancers, whose horses the music seems to affect; then a carriage occupied with high legal personages, with powder in their hair, and rapiers by their sides, which they could not draw for their lives. Then comes the private carriage of his Grace, surrounded by lancers, whose mercurial steeds plunge and rear, and back and sidle, and scatter the mob as they come prancing broadside on to the pavement, smiting sparks of fire from the kerbstones with their iron hoofs. Thereafter, Tom, Jack, and Harry, for every cab, carriage, and omnibus of the line of route is now allowed to fall in--and so, attended by halberdiers, and soldiers, and a brass band, her Majesty's Commissioner goes to open the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. As his Grace has to attend all the sittings of the reverend court, the Government, it is said, generally selects for the office a nobleman slightly dull of hearing. The Commissioner has no power, he has no voice in the deliberations; but he is indispensable, as a corporation mace is indispensable at a corporation meeting. While the debate is going on below, and two reverend fathers are passionately throttling each other, he is not unfrequently seen, with spectacles on nose, placidly perusing the _Times_. He is allowed two thousand pounds a year, and his duty is to spend it. [Sidenote: The Commissioner's levee.] He keeps open table for the assembled clergymen. He holds a grand evening levee, to which several hundred people are invited. If you are lucky enough to receive a card of invitation, you fall into the line of carriages opposite the Register House about eight o'clock, you are off the High School at nine, ten peals from the church-spires when you are at the end of Regent Terrace, and by eleven your name is being shouted by gorgeous lackeys--whose income is probably as great as your own--through the corridors of Holyrood as you advance towards the presence. When you arrive you find that the country parson, with his wife and daughter, have been before you, and you are a lucky man if, for refreshment, you can secure a bit of remainder sponge-cake and a glass of lukewarm sherry. On the last occasion of the Commissioner's levee the newspapers inform me that seventeen hundred invitations were issued. Think of it--seventeen hundred persons on that evening bowed before the Shadow of Majesty, and then backed in their gracefulest manner. On that evening the Shadow of Majesty performed seventeen hundred genuflections! I do not grudge the Lord Commissioner his two thousand pounds. Verily, the labourer is worthy of his hire. The vale of life is not without its advantages.

_STIRLING AND THE NORTH._

Edinburgh and Stirling are spinster sisters, who were both in their youth beloved by Scottish kings; but Stirling is the more wrinkled in feature, the more old-fashioned in attire, and not nearly so well to do in the world. She smacks more of the antique time, and wears the ornaments given her by royal lovers--sadly broken and worn now, and not calculated to yield much if brought to the hammer--more ostentatiously in the public eye than does Edinburgh. On the whole, perhaps, her stock of these red sandstone gew-gaws is the more numerous. In many respects there is a striking likeness between the two cities. Between them they in a manner monopolise Scottish history; kings dwelt in both--in and around both may yet be seen traces of battle. Both have castles towering to heaven from the crests of up-piled rocks; both towns are hilly, rising terrace above terrace. The country around Stirling is interesting from its natural beauty no less than from its historical associations. Many battles were fought in the seeing of the castle towers. Stirling Bridge, Carron, Bannockburn, Sauchieburn, Sheriffmuir, Falkirk--these battle-fields lie in the immediate vicinity. From the field of Bannockburn you obtain the finest view of Stirling. The Ochills are around you. Yonder sleeps the Abbey Craig, where, on a summer day, Wight Wallace sat. You behold the houses climbing up, picturesque, smoke-feathered; and the wonderful rock, in which the grace of the lily and the strength of the hills are mingled, and on which the castle sits as proudly as ever did rose on its stem. Eastward from the castle ramparts stretches a great plain, bounded on either side by mountains, and before you the vast fertility dies into distance, flat as the ocean when winds are asleep. It is through this plain that the Forth has drawn her glittering coils--a silvery entanglement of loops and links--a watery labyrinth--which Macneil has sung in no ignoble numbers, and which every summer the whole world flocks to see. Turn round, look in the opposite direction, and the aspect of the country has entirely changed. It undulates like a rolling sea. Heights swell up into the blackness of pines, and then sink away into valleys of fertile green. At your feet the Bridge of Allan sleeps in azure smoke--the most fashionable of all the Scottish _spas_, wherein, by hundreds of invalids, the last new novel is being diligently perused. Beyond are the classic woods of Keir; and ten miles farther, what see you? A multitude of blue mountains climbing the heavens! The heart leaps up to greet them--the ramparts of a land of romance, from the mouths of whose glens broke of old the foray of the freebooter; and with a chief in front, with banner and pibroch in the wind, the terror of the Highland war. Stirling, like a huge brooch, clasps Highlands and Lowlands together.

[Sidenote: View from Stirling.]

Standing on the ramparts of Stirling Castle, the spectator cannot help noticing an unsightly excresence of stone and lime rising on the brow of the Abbey Craig. This is the Wallace Tower. Designed to commemorate the war for independence, the building is making but slow progress. It is maintained by charitable contributions, like a lying-in hospital. It is a big beggar man, like O'Connell. It is tormented by an eternal lack of pence, like Mr Dick Swiveller. It sends round the hat as frequently as ever did Mr Leigh Hunt. The Wallace Monument, like the Scottish Rights' Association, sprang from the desire--a good deal stronger a few years ago than now--to preserve in Scotland something of a separate national existence. Scotland and England were married at the Union; but by many Scotsmen it is considered more dignified that, while appearing as "one flesh" on great public occasions, the two countries should live in separate apartments, see their own circles of friends, and spend their time as to each other it may seem fit. Whether any good could arise from such a state of matters it is needless to inquire--such a state of matters being a plain impossibility. It is apparent that through intimate connexion, community of interest, the presence of one common government, and in a thousand other ways, Time is crumbling down Scotland and England into--Britain. [Sidenote: Narrowness of Scottish feeling.] We may storm against this from platforms, declaim passionately against it in "Lays of the Cavaliers," lift up our voices and weep over it in "Braemar Ballads," but necessity cares little for these things, and quietly does her work. In Scotland one is continually coming into contact with an unreasonable prejudice against English manners, institutions, and forms of thought; and in her expression of these prejudices Scotland is frequently neither great nor dignified. There is a narrowness and touchiness about her which is more frequently found in villages than in great cities. She continually suspects that the Englishman is about to touch her thistle rudely, or to take liberties with her unicorn. Some eight years ago, when lecturing in Edinburgh, Mr Thackeray was hissed for making an allusion to Queen Mary. The audience knew perfectly well that the great satirist was correct in what he stated; but being an Englishman it was impertinent in him to speak the truth about a Scottish Queen in the presence of Scotsmen. When, on the other hand, an English orator comes amongst us, whether as Lord Rector at one of our universities, or the deliverer of an inaugural address at the Philosophical Institution in Edinburgh, and winds up his harangue with flowing allusions to Wallace, Bruce, Burns, our blue hills, John Knox, Caledonia stern and wild, the garb of old Gaul--the closing sentences are lost to the reporters in the frantic cheers of the audience. Several years ago the Scottish Rights' Association, headed by the most chivalric nobleman, and by the best poet in Scotland, surrounded by a score of merchant princes, assembled in the City Hall of Glasgow, and for a whole night held high jubilee. The patriotic fervours, the eloquent speeches, the volleys of cheers, did not so much as break a single tea-cup or appoint a new policeman. Even the eloquent gentleman who volunteered to lay down his head at Carlisle in support of the good cause has never been asked to implement his promise. The patriot's head is of more use to himself than it can possibly be to any one else. [Sidenote: University reform] And does not this same prejudice against England, this indisposition to yield up ancient importance, this standing upon petty dignity, live in the cry for Scottish University reform? Is not this the heart of the matter--because England has universities, rich with gifts of princes and the bequests of the charitable, should not Scotland have richly-endowed universities also? In nature the ball fits into the socket more or less perfectly; and the Scottish universities are what the wants and requirements of the Scottish people have made them. We cannot grow in a day an Oxford or a Cambridge on this northern soil; and could Scotsmen forget that they are Scotsmen they would see that it is not desirable so to do. Our universities have sent forth for generations physicians, lawyers, divines, properly enough qualified to fulfil their respective duties; and if every ten years or so some half-dozen young men appear with an appetite for a higher education than Scotland can give, and with means to gratify it, what then? In England there are universities able and willing to supply their wants. Their doors stand open to the Scottish youth. Admitting that we could by governmental interference or otherwise make our Scottish universities equal to Oxford or Cambridge in wealth and erudition, would we benefit thereby the half-dozen ambitious Scottish youth? Not one whit. Far better that they should conclude their education at an English university--in that wider confluence of the streams of society--amid those elder traditions of learning and civility.

And yet this erection of the Wallace Tower on the Abbey Craig has a deeper significance than its promoters are in the least degree aware of. There _is_ a certain propriety in the building of a Wallace Monument. Scotland has been united to England, and is beginning to lose remembrance of her independence and separate history--just as the matron in her conjoint duties and interests begins to grow unfamiliar with the events of her girlhood, and with the sound of her maiden name. It is only when the memory of a hero ceases to be a living power in the hearts of men that they think of raising a monument to him. Monuments are for the dead, not for the living. When we hear that some venerable sheik has taken to call public meetings in Mecca, to deliver speeches, and to issue subscription lists for the purpose of raising a monument to Mohammed, and that these efforts are successful, we shall be quite right in thinking that the crescent is in its wane. Although the subscribers think it something quite other, the building of the Wallace Monument is a bidding farewell to Scottish nationality.

[Sidenote: Doune Castle.]

It is from Stirling that I start on my summer journey, and the greater portion of it I purpose to perform on foot. There is a railway now to Callander, whereby time is saved and enjoyment destroyed--but the railway I shall in nowise patronise, meaning to abide by the old coach road. In a short time you are beyond the Bridge of Allan, beyond the woods of Keir, and holding straight on to Dunblane. Reaching it, you pause for a little on the old bridge to look at the artificial waterfall, and the ruined cathedral on the rising ground across the stream, and the walks which Bishop Leighton paced. There is really not much to detain one in the little gray city, and pressing on, you reach Doune, basking on the hill-side. Possibly the reader may never have heard of Doune, yet it has its lions. What are these? Look at the great bulk of the ruined castle! These towers, rising from miles of summer foliage into fair sunlight, a great Duke of Albany beheld for a moment, with a shock of long-past happiness and home, as he laid down his head on the block at Stirling. Rage and shame filled the last heave of the heart, the axe flashed, and----. As you go down the steep town road, there is an old-fashioned garden, and a well close to the wall. Look into it steadily--you observe a shadow on the sandy bottom, and the twinkle of a fin. 'Tis a trout--a blind one, which has dwelt, the people will tell you, in its watery cage, for ten years back. It is considered a most respectable inhabitant, and the urchin daring to angle for it would hardly escape whipping. You may leave Doune now. A Duke of Albany lost his head in the view of its castle, a blind trout lives in its well, and visitors feel more interested in the trout than in the duke. The country in the immediate vicinity of Doune is somewhat bare and unpromising, but as you advance it improves, and a few miles on, the road skirts the Teith, the sweetest voiced of all the Scottish streams. The Roman centurion heard that pebbly murmur on his march even as you now hear it. The river, like all beautiful things, is coquettish, and just when you come to love her music, she sweeps away into the darkness of the woods and leaves you companionless on the dusty road. Never mind, you will meet her again at Callander, and there, for a whole summer day, you can lean on the bridge and listen to her singing. Callander is one of the prettiest of Highland villages. It was sunset as I approached it first, years ago. Beautiful the long crooked street of white-washed houses dressed in rosy colours. Prettily-dressed children were walking or running about. The empty coach was standing at the door of the hotel, and the smoking horses were being led up and down. And right in front stood King Benledi, clothed in imperial purple, the spokes of splendour from the sinking sun raying far away into heaven from behind his mighty shoulders.

[Sidenote: Callander.]

Callander sits like a watcher at the opening of the glens, and is a rendezvous of tourists. To the right is the Pass of Leny--well worthy of a visit. You ascend a steep path, birch-trees on right and left; the stream comes brawling down, sleeping for a moment in black pools beloved by anglers, and then hasting on in foam and fury to meet her sister in the Vale of Menteith below. When you have climbed the pass, you enter on a green treeless waste, and soon approach Loch Lubnaig, with the great shadow of a hill blackening across it. The loch is perhaps cheerful enough when the sun is shining on it, but the sun in that melancholy region is but seldom seen. Beside the road is an old churchyard, for which no one seems to care--the tombstones being submerged in a sea of rank grass. The loch of the rueful countenance will not be visited on the present occasion. My course lies round the left flank of Benledi, straight on for the Trosachs and Loch Katrine. Leaving Callander, you cross the waters of the Leny--changed now from the fury that, with raised voice and streaming tresses, leaped from rock to rock in the glen above--and walk into the country made immortal by the "Lady of the Lake." Every step you take is in the footsteps of Apollo: speech at once becomes song. There is Coilantogle Ford; Loch Venachar, yonder, is glittering away in windy sunshine to the bounding hills. Passing the lake you come on a spot where the hill-side drops suddenly down on the road. On this hill-side Vich Alpine's warriors started out of the ferns at the whistle of their chief; and if you travelled on the coach, the driver would repeat half the poem with curious variations, and point out the identical rock against which Fitz-James leaned--rock on which a dozen eyeglasses are at once levelled in wonder and admiration. The loveliest sight on the route to the Trosachs is about to present itself. [Sidenote: Loch Achray--the Trosachs.] At a turn of the road Loch Achray is before you. Beyond expression beautiful is that smiling lake, mirroring the hills, whether bare and green or plumaged with woods from base to crest. Fair azure gem in a setting of mountains! the traveller--even if a bagman--cannot but pause to drink in its fairy beauty; cannot but remember it when far away amid other scenes and associations. At every step the scenery grows wilder. Loch Achray disappears. High in upper air tower the summits of Ben-Aan and Ben-Venue. You pass through the gorge of the Trosachs, whose rocky walls, born in earthquake and fiery deluge, the fanciful summer has been dressing these thousand years, clothing their feet with drooping ferns and rods of foxglove bells, blackening their breasts with pines, feathering their pinnacles with airy birches, that dance in the breeze like plumage on a warrior's helm. The wind here becomes a musician. Echo sits babbling beneath the rock. The gorge, too, is but the prelude to a finer charm; for before you are aware, doubling her beauty with surprise, there breaks on the right the silver sheet of Loch Katrine, with a dozen woody islands, sleeping peacefully on their shadows.

[Sidenote: Inversneyd]

On the loch, the steamer _Rob Roy_ awaits you, and away you pant and fume towards a wharf, and an inn, with an unpronounceable name, at the farther end. The lake does not increase in beauty as you proceed. All its charms are congregated at the mouth of the Trosachs, and the upper reaches are bare, desolate, and uninteresting. You soon reach the wharf, and after your natural rage at a toll of twopence exacted from you on landing has subsided, and you have had a snack of something at the inn, you start on the wild mountain road towards Inversneyd. The aspect of the country has now changed. The hills around are bare and sterile, brown streams gurgle down their fissures, the long yellow ribbon of road runs away before you, dipping out of sight sometimes, and reappearing afar. You pass a turf hut, and your nostrils are invaded by a waft of peat reek which sets you coughing, and brings the tears into your eyes; and the juvenile natives eye you askance, and wear the airiest form of the national attire. In truth, there is not a finer bit of Highland road to be found anywhere than that which runs between the inn--which, like the Russian heroes in "Don Juan," might be immortal if the name of it could be pronounced by human organs--and the hotel at Inversneyd. When you have travelled some three miles, the scenery improves, the hills rise into nobler forms with misty wreaths about them, and as you pursue your journey a torrent becomes your companion. Presently, a ruin rises on the hill-side, the nettles growing on its melancholy walls. It is the old fort of Inversneyd, built in King William's time to awe the turbulent clans. Nothing can be more desolate than its aspect. Sunshine seems to mock it; it is native and endued into its element when wrapt in mist, or pelted by the wintry rain. Passing the old stone-and-lime mendicant on the hill-side--by the way, Tradition mumbles something about General Wolfe having been stationed there at the beginning of his military career--you descend rapidly on Loch Lomond and Inversneyd. The road by this time has become another Pass of Leny: on either side the hills approach, the torrent roars down in a chain of cataracts, and, in a spirit of bravado, takes its proudest leap at the last. Quite close to the fall is the hotel; and on the frail timber bridge that overhangs the cataract, you can see groups of picturesque-hunters, the ladies gracefully timid, the gentlemen gallant and reassuring. Inversneyd is beautiful, and it possesses an added charm in being the scene of one of Wordsworth's poems; and he who has stood on the crazy bridge, and watched the flash and thunder of the stream beneath him, and gazed on the lake surrounded by mountains, will ever after retain the picture in remembrance, although to him there should not have been vouchsafed the vision of the "Highland Girl." A steamer picks you up at Inversneyd, and slides down Loch Lomond with you to Tarbet, a village sleeping in very presence of the mighty Ben, whose forehead is almost always bound with a cloudy handkerchief. Although the loch is finer higher up, where it narrows toward Glen Falloch--more magnificent lower down, where it widens, many-isled, toward Balloch--it is by no means to be despised at Tarbet. Each bay and promontory wears its peculiar charm; and if the scenery does not astonish, it satisfies. Tarbet can boast, too, of an excellent inn, in which, if the traveller be wise, he will, for one night at least, luxuriously take his ease.

[Sidenote: The "Cobbler".]

Up betimes next morning, you are on the beautiful road which runs between Tarbet and Arrochar, and begin, through broken, white upstreaming mists, to make acquaintance with the "Cobbler" and some other peaks of that rolling country to which Celtic facetiousness has given the name of "The Duke of Argyle's Bowling-green." Escaping from the birches that line the road, and descending on Arrochar and Loch Long, you can leisurely inspect the proportions of the mountain Crispin. He is a gruesome carle, and inhospitable to strangers. He does not wish to be intruded upon--is a very hermit, in fact; for when, after wild waste of breath and cuticle, a daring mortal climbs up to him, anxious to be introduced, behold he has slipped his cable, and is nowhere to be seen. And it does not improve the temper of the climber that, when down again, and casting up his eyes, he discovers the rocky figure sitting in his accustomed place. The Cobbler's Wife sits a little way off--an ancient dame, to the full as withered in appearance as her husband, and as difficult of access. They dwell in tolerable amity the twain, but when they do quarrel it is something tremendous! The whole county knows when a tiff is in progress. The sky darkens above them. The Cobbler frowns black as midnight. His Wife sits sulking in the mist. His Wife's conduct aggravates the Cobbler--who is naturally of a peppery temper--and he gives vent to a discontented growl. Nothing loath, and to the full as irascible as her spouse, his Wife spits back fire upon him. The row begins. They flash at one another in the savagest manner, scolding all the while in the grandest Billingsgate. Everything listens to them for twenty miles round. At last the Wife gives in, and falls to downright weeping, the crusty old fellow sending a shot into her at intervals. She cries, and he grumbles, into the night. Peace seems to have been restored somehow when everybody is asleep; for next morning the Cobbler has renewed his youth. He shines in the sun like a very bridegroom, not a frown on the old countenance of him, and his Wife opposite, the tears hardly dried upon her face yet, smiles upon him through her prettiest head-dress of mist; and for the next six weeks they enjoy as bright, unclouded weather as husband and wife can expect in a world where everything is imperfect.

[Sidenote: Glencroe.]

You leave the little village of Arrochar, trudge round the head of Loch Long, and proceeding downward, along the opposite shore, and skirting the base of the Cobbler, strike for the opening of Glencroe, on your road to Inverary. Glencoe is to the other Highland glens what Tennyson is to contemporary British poets. If Glencoe did not exist, Glencroe would be famous. It is several miles long, lonely, sterile, and desolate. A stream rages down the hollow, fed by tributary burns that dash from the receding mountain-tops. The hill-sides are rough with boulders, as a sea-rock is rough with limpets. Showers cross the path a dozen times during the finest day. As you go along, the glen is dappled with cloud-shadows; you hear the bleating of unseen sheep, and the chances are, that, in travelling along its whole extent, opportunity will not be granted you of bidding "good-morrow" to a single soul. If you are a murderer, you could shout out your secret here, and no one be a bit the wiser. At the head of the glen the road becomes exceedingly steep; and as you pant up the incline, you hail the appearance of a stone seat bearing the welcome motto, "Rest, and be thankful." You rest, and are thankful. This seat was erected by General Wade while engaged in his great work of Highland road-making; and so long as it exists the General will be remembered--and Earl Russell too. At this point the rough breast of a hill rises in front, dividing the road; the path to the left runs away down into the barren and solitary Hell's Glen, in haste to reach Loch Goil; the other to the right leads through bare Glen Arkinglass, to St Catherine's, and the shore of Loch Fyne, at which point you arrive after a lonely walk of two hours.

[Sidenote: John Campbell.]

The only thing likely to interest the stranger at the little hostelry of St Catherine's is John Campbell, the proprietor of the same, and driver of the coach from the inn to the steamboat wharf at Loch Goil. John has a presentable person and a sagacious countenance; his gray eyes are the homes of humour and shrewdness; and when seated on the box, he flicks his horses and manages the ribbons to admiration. He is a good story-teller, and he knows it. He has not started on his journey a hundred yards when, from something or another, he finds you occasion for a story, which is sure to produce a roar of laughter from those alongside of, and behind, him. Encouraged by success, John absolutely coruscates, anecdote follows anecdote as flash of sheet-lightning succeeds flash of sheet-lightning on a summer night; and by the time he is half-way, he is implored to desist by some sufferer whose midriff he has convulsed. John is naturally a humorist; and as every summer and autumn the Highlands are overrun with tourists, he, from St Catherine's to Loch Goil, surveys mankind with extensive view. In his time he has talked with most of our famous men, and can reproduce their tones to perfection. It is curious to notice how literary and political greatness picture themselves in the eyes of a Highland coachman! The lion who entrances the _soirées_ has his mane clipped. For John Campbell, cliques and coteries, and the big guns of the reviews, exist not. To him Fame speaks in Gaelic, and concerns herself mainly with sheep and black cattle. What is the good of being a distinguished novelist if you cannot swallow a glass of bitters of a morning? John will distinguish between Tupper and Tennyson, and instruct you which is the better man, but he will draw his conclusions from their "tips" rather than from their poetry. He will agree with you that Lord Palmerston is a distinguished individual; but while you are thinking of the Premier's statesmanship, he is thinking of the Premier's jauntiness on the morning he had the honour of driving him. John's ideas of public men, although arrived at after a curious fashion, are pretty generally correct. Every one who tarries at St Catherine's should get himself driven across to Loch Goil by John Campbell, and should take pains to procure a seat on the box beside him. When he returns to the south, he can relate over again the stories he hears, and make himself the hero of them. The thing has been done before, and will be again.

[Sidenote: Inverary.]

A small wash-tub of a steamer carries you across Loch Fyne to Inverary in an hour. Arriving, you find the capital of the West Highlands a rather pretty place, with excellent inns, several churches, a fine bay, a ducal residence, a striking conical hill--Duniquoich the barbarous name of it--wooded to the chin, and with an ancient watch-tower perched on its bald crown. The chief seat of the Argyles cannot boast of much architectural beauty, being a square building with pepper-box-looking towers stuck on the corners. The grounds are charming, containing fine timber, winding walks, stately avenues, gardens, and through all, spanned by several bridges, the Airy bubbles sweetly to the sea. Scott is here. If the "Lady of the Lake" rings in your ears at the Trosachs, the "Legend of Montrose" haunts you at Inverary. Every footstep of ground is hallowed by that noble romance. It is the best guide-book to the place. No tourist should leave Inverary before he ascends Duniquoich--no very difficult task either, for a path winds round and round it. When you emerge from the woods beside the watch-tower on the summit, Inverary, far beneath, has dwindled to a toy town--not a sound is in the streets; unheard the steamer roaring at the wharf, and urging dilatory passengers to haste by the clashes of an angry bell. Along the shore nets stretched from pole to pole wave in the drying wind. The great boatless blue loch stretches away flat as a ballroom floor; and the eye wearies in its flight over endless miles of brown moor and mountain. Turn your back on the town, and gaze towards the north! It is still "a far cry to Loch Awe," and a wilderness of mountain peaks tower up between you and that noblest of Scottish lakes!--of all colours too--green with pasture, brown with moorland, touched with the coming purple of the heather, black with a thunder-cloud of pines. What a region to watch the sun go down upon! But for that you cannot wait; for to-day you lunch at Cladich, dine at Dalmally, and sleep in the neighbourhood of Kilchurn--in the immediate presence of Ben Cruachan.

[Sidenote: Kilchurn Castle.]

A noble vision of mountains is to be obtained from the road above Cladich. Dalmally is a very paradise of a Highland inn,--quiet, sequestered, begirt with the majesty and the silence of mountains,--a place where a world-weary man may soothe back into healthful motion jarred pulse and brain; a delicious nest for a happy pair to waste the honeymoon in. Dalmally stands on the shores of Loch Awe, and in the immediate vicinity of Kilchurn Castle and Ben Cruachan. The castle is picturesque enough to please the eye of the landscape-painter, and large enough to impress the visitor with a sense of baronial grandeur. And it is ancient enough, and fortunate enough too--for to that age does not always attain--to have legends growing upon its walls like the golden lichens or the darksome ivies. The vast shell of a building looks strangely impressive standing there, mirrored in summer waters, with the great mountain looking down on it. It was built, it is said, by a lady in the Crusade times, when her lord was battling with the infidel. The most prosaic man gazing on a ruin becomes a poet for the time being. You incontinently sit down, and think how, in the old pile, life went on for generations--how children were born and grew up there--how brides were brought home there, the bridal blushes yet on their cheeks--how old men died there, and had by filial fingers their eyes closed, as blinds are drawn down on the windows of an empty house, and the withered hands crossed decently upon the breasts that will heave no more with any passion. The yule fires, and the feast fires that blazed on the old hearths have gone out now. The arrow of the foeman seeks no longer the window slit. To day and night, to winter and summer, Kilchurn stands empty as a skull; yet with no harshness about it; possessed rather of a composed and decent beauty--reminding you of a good man's grave, with the number of his ripe years, and the catalogue of his virtues chiselled on the stone above him: telling of work faithfully done, and of the rest that follows, for which all the weary pine.

[Sidenote: Loch Awe.]

Ben Cruachan, if not the monarch of Scottish mountains, is, at all events, one of the princes of the blood. He is privileged to wear a snow-wreath in presence of the sun at his midsummer levee, and like a prince he wears it on the rough breast of him. Ben Cruachan is seen from afar: is difficult to climb, and slopes slowly down to the sea level, his base being twenty miles in girth, it is said. From Ben Cruachan and Kilchurn, Loch Awe, bedropt with wooded islands, stretches Obanwards, presenting in its course every variety of scenery. Now the loch spreads like a sea, now it shrinks to a rapid river--now the banks are wooded like the Trosachs, now they are bare as the "Screes" at Wastwater; and consider as you walk along what freaks light and shade are playing every moment--how shadows, hundred-armed, creep along the mountain-side--how the wet rock sparkles like a diamond, and then goes out--how the sunbeam slides along a belt of pines--and how, a slave to the sun, the lake quivers in light around her islands when he is unobscured, and wears his sable colours when a cloud is on his face. On your way to Oban there are many places worth seeing: Loch Etive, with its immemorial pines, beloved by Professor Wilson; Bunawe, Taynult, Connel Ferry, with its sea view and salt-water cataract; and Dunstaffnage Castle, once a royal residence, and from which the stone was taken which is placed beneath the coronation chair at Westminster. And so, if the whole journey from Inverary is performed on foot, Luna will light the traveller into Oban.

_OBAN._

[Sidenote: Oban.]

Oban, which, during winter, is a town of deserted hotels, begins to get busy by the end of June. Yachts skim about in the little bay; steamers, deep-sea and coasting, are continually arriving and departing; vehicles rattle about in the one broad, and the many narrow streets; and in the inns, boots, chamber-maid, and waiter are distracted with the clangour of innumerable bells. Out of doors, Oban is not a bad representation of Vanity Fair. Every variety of pleasure-seeker is to be found there, and every variety of costume. Reading parties from Oxford lounge about, smoke, stare into the small shop windows, and consult "Black's Guide." Beauty, in light attire, perambulates the principal street, and taciturn Valour in mufti accompanies her. Sportsmen in knickerbockers stand in groups at the hotel doors; Frenchmen chatter and shrug their shoulders; stolid Germans smoke curiously-curved meerschaum pipes; and individuals who have not a drop of Highland blood in their veins flutter about in the garb of the Gael, "a hundredweight of cairngorms throwing a prismatic glory around their persons." All kinds of people, and all kinds of sounds are there. From the next street the tones of the bagpipe come on the ear; tipsy porters abuse each other in Gaelic. Round the corner the mail comes rattling from Fort William, the passengers clustering on its roof; from the pier the bell of the departing steamer urges passengers to make haste; and passengers who have lost their luggage rush about, shout, gesticulate, and not unfrequently come into fierce personal collision with one of the tipsy porters aforesaid. A more hurried, nervous, frenzied place than Oban, during the summer and autumn months, it is difficult to conceive. People seldom stay there above a night. The old familiar faces are the resident population. The tourist no more thinks of spending a week in Oban than he thinks of spending a week in a railway station. When he arrives his first question is after a bedroom; his second, as to the hour at which the steamer from the south is expected.

And the steamer, be it said, does not always arrive at a reasonable hour. She may be detained some time at Greenock; in dirty weather she may be "on" the Mull of Cantyre all night, buffeted by the big Atlantic there; so that he must be a bold man, or a man gifted with the second sight, who ventures anything but a vague guess as to the hour of her arrival at Oban. And the weather _is_ dirty; the panes are blurred with raindrops; outside one beholds an uncomfortable sodden world, a spongy sky above, and midway, a gull sliding sideways through the murky atmosphere. The streets are as empty now as they will be some months hence. Beauty is in her own room crying over "Enoch Arden," and Valour, taciturn as ever, is in the smoking saloon. The Oxford reading party--which, under the circumstances, has not the slightest interest in Plato--attempts, with no great success, to kill the time by playing at pitch-and-toss. The gentlemen in the Highland dress remain indoors--birds with fine feathers do not wish to have them draggled--and the philabeg and an umbrella would be a combination quite too ridiculous. The tipsy porter is for the time silent; but from the next street the bagpipe grows in volume and torture. How the sound of it pains the nervous ear of a man half-maddened by a non-arriving steamer and a rainy day at Oban! Heavily the hours creep on; and at last the _Clansman_ does steam in with wet decks--thoroughly washed by Atlantic brine last night--and her hundred and fifty passengers, two-thirds of whom are sea-sick.

I do not, however, proceed with the _Clansman_. I am waited for at Inverness; and so, when the weather has cleared, on a lovely morning, I am chasing the flying dazzle of the sun up the lovely Linnhe Loch; past hills that come out on one and recede; past shores that continually shift and change; and am at length set down at Fort William in the shadow of Ben Nevis.

When a man goes to Caprera, he, as a matter of course, brings a letter of introduction to Garibaldi--when I went to Fort William, I, equally as a matter of course, brought a letter of introduction to Long John. This gentleman, the distiller of the place, was the tallest man I ever beheld out of an exhibition--whence his familiar _sobriquet_--and must, in his youth, have been of incomparable physique. The German nation has not yet decided whether Goethe or Schiller is the greater poet--the Highlander has not yet decided whether "Long John" or "Talisker" is the finer spirit. I presented my letter and was received with the hospitality and courteous grace so characteristic of the old Gael. He is gone now, the happy-hearted Hercules--gone like one of his own drams! His son distils in his stead--but he must feel that he is treading in the footsteps of a greater man. The machinery is the same, the malt is of quality as fine, but he will never produce whisky like him who is no more. The text is the same, but Charles Kean's Hamlet will never be like his father's.

I saw Inverlochy Castle, and thought of the craven Argyle, the gallant Montrose, the slaughtered Campbells. I walked up Glen Nevis; and then, one summer morning, I drove over to Bannavie, stepped on board a steamer, and was soon in the middle of the beautiful Loch Lochy.

[Sidenote: Culloden.]

And what a day and what a sail that was! What a cloudless sky above! What lights and shadows as we went! On Fort Augustus we descended by a staircase of locks, and while there I spent half an hour in the museum of Roualeyn Gordon-Cumming. We then entered Loch Ness--stopped for a space to visit the Fall of Foyers, which, from scarcity of water, looked "seedy" as a moulting peacock; saw further on, and on the opposite shore, a promontory run out into the lake like an arm, and the vast ruin of Castle Urquhart at the end of it like a clenched fist--menacing all and sundry. Then we went on to Inverness, where I found my friend Fellowes, who for some time back had been amusing himself in that pleasant Highland town reading law. We drove out to Culloden, and stood on the moor at sunset. Here the butcher Cumberland trod out romance. Here one felt a Jacobite and a Roman Catholic. The air seemed scented by the fumes of altar-incense, by the burning of pastiles. The White Rose was torn and scattered, but its leaves had not yet lost their odours. "I should rather have died," I said, "like that wild chief who, when his clan would not follow him, burst into tears at the ingratitude of his children, and charged alone on the English bayonets, than like any other man of whom I have read in history."

"He wore the sole pair of brogues in the possession of his tribe," said my companion. "I should rather have died like Salkeld at the blowing in of the Delhi gate."

_SKYE AT LAST._

While tarrying at Inverness, a note which we had been expecting for some little time reached Fellowes and myself from M'Ian junior, to the effect that a boat would be at our service at the head of Loch Eishart on the arrival at Broadford of the Skye mail; and that six sturdy boatmen would therefrom convey us to our destination. This information was satisfactory, and we made our arrangements accordingly. The coach from Inverness to Dingwall--at which place we were to catch the mail--was advertised to start at four o'clock in the morning, and to reach its bourne two hours afterwards; so, to prevent all possibility of missing it, we resolved not to go to bed. At that preposterous hour we were in the street with our luggage, and in a short time the coach--which seemed itself not more than half awake--came lumbering up. For a while there was considerable noise; bags and parcels of various kinds were tumbled out of the coach office, mysterious doors were opened in the body of the vehicle into which these were shot. The coach stowed away its parcels in itself, just as in itself the crab stows away its food and _impedimenta_. We clambered up into the front beside the driver, who was enveloped in a drab great-coat of many capes; the guard was behind. "All right," and then, with a cheery chirrup, a crack of the whip, a snort and toss from the gallant roadsters, we were off. There is nothing so delightful as travelling on a stage coach, when you start in good condition, and at a reasonable hour. For myself, I never tire of the varied road flashing past, and could dream through a country in that way from one week's end to the other. On the other hand, there is nothing more horrible than starting at four A.M., half-awake, breakfastless, the chill of the morning playing on your face as the dewy machine spins along. Your eyes close in spite of every effort, your blood thick with sleep, your brain stuffed with dreams; you wake and sleep, and wake again; and the Vale of Tempe itself, with a Grecian sunrise burning into day ahead, could not rouse you into interest, or blunt the keen edge of your misery. I recollect nothing of this portion of our journey save its disagreeableness; and alit at Dingwall, cold, wretched, and stiff, with a cataract of needles and pins pouring down my right leg, and making locomotion anything but a pleasant matter. However, the first stage was over, and on that we congratulated ourselves. Alas! we did not know the sea of troubles into which we were about to plunge--the Iliad of misfortune of which we were about to become the heroes. We entered the inn, performed our ablutions, and sat down to breakfast with appetite. Towards the close of the meal my companion suggested that, to prevent accidents, it might be judicious to secure seats in the mail without delay. Accordingly I went in quest of the landlord, and after some difficulty discovered him in a small office littered with bags and parcels, turning over the pages of a ledger. He did not lift his eyes when I entered. I intimated my wish to procure two places toward Broadford. He turned a page, lingered on it with his eye as if loath to leave it, and then inquired my business. I repeated my message. He shook his head. "You are too late; you can't get on to-day." "What! can't two places be had?" "Not for love or money, sir. Last week Lord Deerstalker engaged the mail for his servants. Every place is took." "The deuce! do you mean to say that we can't get on?" The man, whose eyes had returned to the page, which he held all the while in one hand, nodded assent. "Come, now, this sort of thing won't do. My friend and I are anxious to reach Broadford to-night. Do you mean to say that we must either return or wait here till the next mail comes up, some three days hence?" "You can post, if you like: I'll provide you with a machine and horses." "You'll provide us with a machine and horses," said I, while something shot through my soul like a bolt of ice.

I returned to Fellowes, who replied to my recital of the interview with a long whistle. When the mail was gone, we formed ourselves into a council of war. After considering our situation from every side, we agreed to post, unless the landlord should prove more than ordinarily rapacious. I went to the little office and informed him of our resolution. We chaffered a good deal, but at last a bargain was struck. I will not mention what current coin of the realm was disbursed on the occasion; the charge was as moderate as in the circumstances could have been expected. I need only say that the journey was long, and to consist of six stages, a fresh horse at every stage.

In due time a dog-cart was brought to the door, in which was harnessed a tall raw-boned white horse, who seemed to be entering in the sullen depths of his consciousness a protest against our proceedings. We got in, and the animal was set in motion. There never was such a slow brute. He evidently disliked his work: perhaps he snuffed the rainy tempest imminent. Who knows! At all events, before he was done with us he took ample revenge for every kick and objurgation which we bestowed on him. Half an hour after starting, a huge rain-cloud was black above us; suddenly we noticed one portion crumble into a livid streak which slanted down to earth, and in a minute or two it burst upon us as if it had a personal injury to avenge. A scold of the Cowgate, emptying her wrath on the husband of her bosom, who has reeled home to her tipsy on Saturday night, with but half his wages in his pocket, gives but a faint image of its virulence. Umbrellas and oil-skins--if we had had them--would have been useless. In less than a quarter of an hour we were saturated like a bale of cotton which has reposed for a quarter of a century at the bottom of the Atlantic; and all the while, against the fell lines of rain, heavy as bullets, straight as cavalry lances, jogged the white horse, heedless of cry and blow, with now and again but a livelier prick and motion of the ear, as if to him the whole thing was perfectly delightful. The first stage was a long one; and all the way from Strathpeffer to Garve, from Garve to Milltown, the rain rushed down on blackened wood, hissed in marshy tarn, boiled on iron crag. At last the inn was descried afar; a speck of dirty white in a world of rainy green. Hope revived within us. Another horse could be procured there. O Jarvie, cudgel his bones amain, and Fortune may yet smile!

On our arrival, however, we were informed that certain travellers had, two hours before, possessed themselves of the only animal of which the establishment could boast. At this intelligence hope fell down stone dead as if shot through the heart. There was nothing for it but to give our steed a bag of oats, and then to hie on. While the white was comfortably munching his oats, we noticed from the inn-door that the wet yellow road made a long circuit, and it occurred to us that if we struck across country for a mile or so at once, we could reach the point where the road disappeared in the distance quite as soon as our raw-boned friend. In any case waiting was weary work, and we were as wet now as we could possibly be. Instructing the driver to wait for us should we not be up in time--of which we averred there was not the slightest possibility--we started. We had firm enough footing at first; but after a while our journey was the counterpart of the fiend's passage through chaos, as described by Milton. Always stick to beaten tracks: short cuts, whether in the world of matter, or in the world of ethics, are bad things. In a little time we lost our way, as was to have been expected. The wind and rain beat right in our faces, we had swollen streams to cross, we tumbled into morasses, we tripped over knotted roots of heather. When, after a severe march of a couple of hours, we gained the crest of a small eminence, and looked out on the wet, black desolation, Fellowes took out a half-crown from his waistcoat pocket, and expressed his intention there and then to "go in" for a Highland property. From the crest of this eminence, too, we beheld the yellow road beneath, and the dog-cart waiting; and when we got down to it, found the driver so indignant that we thought it prudent to propitiate him with our spirit flask. A caulker turneth away wrath--in the Highlands at least.