Bonnie Scotland

lands seem as unduly neglected by tourists as the southern mountains of Wales. Yet across the Moray Firth, that half insulates t

ean seas; but also it has winning smiles and impressive frowns for those

a grim story that does not go without question: in the church here a congregation of Mackenzies is said to have been burned alive, to the sound of the bagpipes, by their Christian enemies of Glengarry, a memory of ancient manners which Wordsworth laments as "withering to the root." One of Lord Lovat's hiding-places was an island in the river, that afterwards became a summer retreat of Sir Robert Peel; and its romantic cottage was for a time the home of the two Sobieski or Allan brothers who made a mysterious claim

Black Isle, on which stand the ex-cathedral city of Fortrose, and Cromarty on the deep inlet guarded by its cave-worn Sutors, where one can ferry over the mouth of this Cromarty Firth to the farther promontory, ended

S NEAR BEAULY,

point of the Black Isle, still flourishes in a modest way, after shifting its site so that the Cross had to be bodily removed. It has reared at least two notable sons, one that literary Cavalier Sir Thomas Urquhart, who so well translated Rabelais while a prisoner in the Tower, whence he published other ingenious works that but feebly represent his industry, for

ome glens of the Highlands shelter knots of Episcopacy; but when the Gael does take to Presbyterianism, he likes it hot and strong. This was the diocese of the "Men," those inquisitorial elders who played such a severe part in church life of older days. The Free Church movement found great acceptation in the Highlands, so much so that in many parishes the Old Kirk has been almost deserted. And the Free Church in the far north is still largely officered by a school of ministers, who, fervidly rejecting the conclusions of criticism and latitudinarian liberality, are known as the "Highland host," by humorous inversion of a phrase that once applied to an instrument of the prelatical party. The recent broadening of this body's base has here been fiercely resisted, some con

ing the Mosaic geology with advancing science proved too much for his brain. Had his lot been cast in our generation, divines of his own beloved communion would have taught him more accommoda

to a disbanded Highland regiment, attests a genial summer; and beside the Pump-room Highland Eves tempt the drinkers with tantalising piles of strawberries, forbidden by the faculty as plum-pudding at Kissingen; but it is to be feared that British invalids are less docile to Kurgem?ss rules. The village lies in a valley begirt by charming scenery of "dwarf Highlands" about the course of the Conon and other streams. Hugh Miller worked here as a mason lad, and his "recollections of this rich tract of country, with its woods and towers and noble river, seem as if bathed in the rich light of gorgeous sunsets." The long summer evenings light up patches of heather over which is the way to such beauty spots as Loch Achilty, the Falls of Conon, and the Falls of Rogie, that have been compared to Tivoli. Close at hand is Castle Leod, famed for enormous Spanish chestnuts that give the lie to Dr. Johnson; and farther off are other ancient mansions, Brahan Castle, w

H, PERTHSHIRE

, grey with lichened stone, and bosky with birch and hazel." On one of these are the ruins of a chapel of the Virgin Mary, who was perhaps godmother to Loch Maree. Beyond it open the sea-inlets Torridon, Gairloch, and Loch Ewe; and the coast northwards by Ullapool and Loch Inver is pierced by deep fiords and overlooked by grand summits, worn down from Himalayan masses of old. On the road from Garve to Ullapool, beside the strath looking down to Loch Broom, an oasis of greenery enshrines the Me

here is the chasm of the Black Rock, through which a stream from Loch Glass leaps in a series of cascades gouging out an open tunnel that sometimes is only a few yards wide at the

of rank, succulent herbs, that love the damp shade and the frequent drizzle of the spray; and there, hollow and bare, with their round pebbles sticking out from the partially decomposed surface, like the piled-up skulls in the great underground cemetery of the Parisians.... And over the sullen pool in front we may see the stern pillars of the portal rising from eighty to a hundred feet in height, and scarce twelve feet apart, like the massive obelisks of some Egyptian temple; while in gloomy vista within, projection starts out beyond projection, like column beyond column in some narrow avenue of approach to Luxor or Carnac. The precipices are green, with some moss or by

features of mountains and open moors, lakes, "waters," "straths," and the "kyles" of its coast, those deep narrow sounds taking their Gaelic name from the same root as Calais. Three of its five sides are washed by the sea. The interior is chiefly given up to deer and sheep, with here and there an oasis of moorland farm, rescued from the heather as Holland from salt water, and only b

ounty from Lairg, is the longest lake, about which man has waged feeble war with the sternness of Nature; but the wildest scene is Loch Assynt, near the west coast, tapering among a group of grand mountains such as the Sutherlandshire Ben More and the three-peaked mass of Quinaig. This remote nook seems neglected by authors, yet a picturesque novelist might here find material for a second

, at the map, we can still see in the endless contortions of the shore, as we used to do when children, the figures and profiles of men and beasts-not one of them in any degree like to any other. There are brows flat and high on the headlands; eyes large and small in the lochs and tarns; noses Roman, Grecian, retroussé, on the rocky cap

F LOCH MARE

which is something far more and better, you will find at every turn of the highway new matter of surprise and admiration. Island-studded bays like Badcall, picturesque retreats like Scourie; deeply indented lochs like Laxford, the 'Fiord of salmon'; distant views of a mountain-chain of peaks; long successions of rocky knolls crowned with brushwood and heather-these are a few of the

the honest Highlanders. There has been little crime here since the last witch was burned on British soil in 1722 at Dornoch. What brings strangers to Dornoch, now that it has a railway branch, is its golf-links, extending for thousands of acres on the seashore; and this far-northern understudy of St. Andrews offers a remarkably good autumn climate, often mild up till Christmas. Not much bigger is Golspie, with its sea-girt pile of Dunrobin, seat of the ducal family that, owning mo

y is still Highland, where the train runs on miles and miles over unbroken stretches of heather; then farther north these fall away into a windy expanse of hollows and ridges, in which Nature would seem to have come short of material for ending off our island with picturesque effect; the central part has even been called the most forlorn wilderness in Britain. Caithness, like other countrysides, has been "improved" in our

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seen the multitudinous herring-fishing fleet set sail from Wick in the long summer twilight. Angling can be had in a chain of some dozen lochs drained by the Thurso river that runs through the county from south to north, at the mouth of which over 2500 sal

"Black Monday," since when, it is said, no Sinclair will cross the Ord ridge on a Monday. Another sore loss fell on the clan a century later, when a certain Colonel Sinclair, heedless of what foreign enlistment regulations had then taken shape, led a regiment of his clan to serve Gustavus Adolphus against Norway, but, attacked by Norwegian peasants in a narrow gorge, more than half of them were crushed beneath rocks hurled down from above, as the French soldiers in Tyrol, or the Turks in defiles of the Kurdish Dersim. The monument on the spot records the death of fourteen hundred kindly Scots, which appears an exaggeration; but it is said that not a score escaped with their lives.

MOUNTAIN,

wn quarries-opposite his house in Edinburgh, it was readily nicknamed the "Giant's Causeway." The main branch of the Sinclairs, whose titles at one time, says Sir Walter, might h

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hanging shelves and gables, swirling "pots" and foaming reefs, isolated stacks lashed by every tide, broken teeth bored and filled by every storm, and the deep chasms here called geos, that sometimes lead down to beaches rich in fine and rare shells, for one, "John o' Groat's Buckie," akin to the cowries of the tropics. In the damp crevices, also, grow rare herbs such as that "Holy Grass" found by Robert Dick of Thurso, one of Mr. Smiles's "discoveries" in the species of self-helped naturalists. More truly than of Cornwall, it may be said that Caithness seldom grows wood enough to make a coffin. Where Cornwal

pion of a theory which connects the dimly historic Picts or Pechts and the legendary Fians with the whole fabulous family of fairies, elves, goblins, brownies, pixies, trolls, or what not, who are represented as dwarfish and subterranean, issuing forth from their retreats to hold varied relations of service or mischief with ordinary men. The name of the Fians, belonging to Ireland as well as to the Scottish Highlands, and fitly represented in the dark doings of Fenians, may point to Finland, where small Laplanders still exist in flesh and blood. The "good people," who long haunted Highland and Lowland glens,-but it seems they cannot abide the scratching of steel pens or the squeaking of slate pencils,-were apt to be tiny, of retiring habits, and in the way of disappearing undergrou

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descent, whose family, split into eight branches, kept up meeting for an annual feast; then to avoid squabblings for precedence, John hit on the idea of an octagonal table in an eight-sided house, with eight doors and eight windows, in which, let us trust, his kinsmen were not at sixes and sevens. Here we may have some hint of such a contest for chieftainship as is not unknown among Highland clans, else the folk-lorists must find this a hard text to expound. Three, seven, and nine are all mystic numbers; five is time-honoured in the East, as four in the Western world; two and

POOLEWE,

roat must give way before the fact of Groat being apparently a real Dutch name. Nor is it "past dispute" that here geese are bred from barnacles, as asserted by sundry authors, among them that tourist of Cromwell's time, Richard Franck

l to the fore, who some twenty years ago was presented with a testimonial for his constancy in carrying across the mail during the lifetime of a generation. He belonged to a school of ancient mariners who had the knack of smelling their way about the sea, whereas our modern Nelsons, it seems, don't know where they are till they have gone down into their cabin and worked out a sum. I once crossed with this "skeely skipper," and was much struck by his method of navigation. A thick fog cam

otes not beauty but sheep. This muggy and windy archipelago, indeed, is hardly Scottish ground, but an ex-Danish possession, held in pledge by us for a princess's dowry that seems like to be paid on the Greek Calend