University of Virginia Library

134. LETTER CXXXIV.

We passed the head of the valley near Tyndrum,
where M`Dougal of Lorn defeated the Bruce, and
were half way up the wild pass that makes its southern
outlet, when our Highland driver, with a shout of delight,
pointed out to us a red deer, standing on the
very summit of the highest mountain above us. It
was an incredible distance to see any living thing, but
he stood clear against the sky, in a relief as strong as
if he had been suspended in the air, and with his head
up, and his chest toward us, seemed the true monarch
of the wild.

At Invarenden, Donald M`Phee begged for the discharge
of himself and his horse and cart from our
service. He had come with us eighty miles, and was
afraid to venture farther on his travels, having never
before been twenty miles from the Highland village
where he lived. It was amusing to see the curiosity
with which he looked about him, and the caution with
which he suffered the hostler at the inn to take the
black mare out of his sight. The responsibility of
the horse and cart weighed heavily on his mind, and
he expressed his hope to “get her back safe,” with an
apprehensive resolution that would have become a
knight-errant guiding himself for his most perilous
encounter. Poor Donald! how little he knew how
wide is the world, and how very like one part of it is
to another!

Our host of Invarerden supplied us with another
cart to take us down to Tarbot, and having dined with
a waterfall-looking inn at each of our two opposite
windows (the inn stands in a valley between two
mountains), we were committed to the care of his eldest
boy, and jolted off for the head of Loch Lomond.

I have never happened to see a traveller who had
seen Loch Lomond in perfectly good weather. My
companion had been there every summer for several
years, and believed it always rained under Ben Lomond.
As we came in sight of the lake, however, the
water looked like one sheet of gold-leaf, trembling, as
if by the motion of fish below, but unruffled by wind;
and if paradise were made so fair, and had such waters
in its midst, I could better conceive than before, the
unhappiness of Adam when driven forth. The sun
was just setting, and the road descended immediately
to the shore, and kept along under precipitous rocks,
and slopes of alternate cultivation and heather, to the
place of our destination. And a lovely place it is!
Send me to Tarbot when I would retreat from the
world. It is an inn buried in a grove at the foot of
the hills, and set in a bend of the lake shore, like a
diamond upon an “orbed brow;” and the light in its
kitchen, as we approached in the twilight, was as interesting
as a ray of the “first water” from the same.
We had now reached the route of the cockney tourists,
and while we perceived it agreeably in the excellence
of the hotel, we perceived it disagreeably in the
price of the wines, and the presence of what my friend
called “unmitigated vulgarisms” in the coffee-room.
That is the worst of England. The people are vulgar,
but not vulgar enough. One dances with the
lazzaroni at Naples, when he would scarce think of
handing the newspaper to the “person” on a tour at
Tarbot. Condescension is the only agreeable virtue,
I have made up my mind.

Well — it was moonlight. The wind was south and
affectionate, and the road in front of the hotel “fleck'd
with silver,” and my friend's wife, and the corresponding
object of interest to myself, being on the other
side of Ben Lomond and the Tweed, we had nothing
for it after supper but to walk up and down with one
another, and talk of the past. In the course of our
ramble, we walked through an open gate, and ascending
a gravel-walk, found a beautiful cottage, built between
two mountain streams, and ornamented with
every device of taste and contrivance. The mild pure
torrents were led over falls, and brought to the thresholds
of bowers; and seats, and bridges, and winding-paths,
were distributed up the steep channels, in a way
that might make it a haunt for Titania. It is the
property, we found afterward, of a Scotch gentleman,
and a great summer retreat of the celebrated Jeffrey,
his friend. It was one more place to which my heart
clung in parting.

Loch Lomond still sat for its picture in the morning,
and after an early breakfast, we took a row-boat,
with a couple of Highlanders, for Inversnade, and
pulled across the lake with a kind of drowsy delightfulness
in the scene and air which I have never before
found out of Italy. We overshot our destination a
little to look into Rob Roy's Cave, a dark deu in the
face of the rock, which has the look of his vocation;
and then, pulling back along the shore, we were landed,
in the spray of a waterfall, at a cottage occupied
by the boatmen of his Highland ferry. From this
point across to Loch Katrine, is some five miles, and
the scene of Scott's novel of Rob Roy. It has been
“done” so often by tourists, that I leave all particular
description of the localities and scenery to the well-hammered
remembrance of readers of magazines,
and confine myself to my own private adventures.

The distance between the lakes is usually performed
by ladies on donkeys, and by gentlemen on foot,
but being myself rather tender-toed with the gout, my
companion started off alone, and I lay down on the
grass at Inversnade to wait the return of the long-eared
troop, who were gone across with an earlier
party. The waterfall and the cottage just above the
edge of the lake, a sharp hill behind, closely wooded
with birch and fir, and, on a green sward platform in
the rear of the house, two Highland lasses and a laddie,
treading down a stack of new hay, were not bad
circumstances in which to be left alone with the witcheries
of the great enchanter.

I must narrate here an adventure in which my own
part was rather a discomfiture, but which will show
somewhat the manners of the people. My companion
had been gone half an hour, and I was lying at
the foot of a tree, listening to the waterfall and looking
off on the lake, and watching, by fits, the lad and
lasses I have spoken of, who were building a haystack
between them, and chattering away most unceasingly
in Gaelick. The eldest of the girls was a tall, ill-favored
damsel, merry as an Oread, but as ugly as Donald
Bean; and, after a while, I began to suspect, by
the looks of the boy below, that I had furnished her
with a new theme. She addressed some remark to
me presently, and a skirmish of banter ensued, which
ended in a challenge to me to climb upon the stack.
It was about ten feet high, and shelving outward from
the bottom, and my Armida had drawn up the ladder.
The stack was built, however, under a high tree, and
I was soon up the trunk, and, swinging off from a long
branch, dropped into the middle of the stack. In the
same instant, I was raised in a grasp to which I could
offer no resistance, and, with a fling to which I should
have believed the strength of few men equal, thrown
clear of the stack to the ground. I alighted on my
back, with a fall of, perhaps, twelve feet, and felt seriously
hurt. The next moment, however, my gentle
friend had me in her arms (I am six feet high in my
stockings), and I was carried into the cottage, and laid
on a flock bed, before I could well decide whether my
back was broken or no. Whiskey was applied externally
and internally, and the old crone, who was the
only inhabitant of the hovel, commenced a lecture in
Gaelick, as I stood once more sound upon my legs,

which seemed to take effect upon the penitent, though
her victim was no wiser for it. I took the opportunity
to look at the frame which had proved itself of such
vigorous power; but, except arms of extraordinary
length, she was like any other equally ugly, middle-sized
woman. In the remaining half hour, before the
donkeys arrived, we became the best of friends, and
she set me off for Loch Katrine, with a caution to the
ass-driver to take care of me, which that sandy-haired
Highlander took as an excellent joke. And no wonder!

The long mountain-glen between these two lakes
was the home of Rob Roy, and the Highlanders point
out various localities, all commemorated in Scott's incomparable
story. The house where Helen M`Gregor
was born lies a stone's throw off the road to the left,
and Rob's gun is shown by an old woman who lives
near by. He must have been rich in arms by the
same token; for, beside the well-authenticated one at
Abbotsford, I have seen some dozen guns, and twice
as many daggers and shot-pouches, which lay claim
to the same honor. I paid my shilling to the old woman
not the less. She owed it to the pleasure I had
received from Sir Walter's novel.

The view of Loch Lomond back from the highest
point of the pass is incomparably fine; at least, when
I saw it; for sunshine and temperature, and the effect
of the light vapors on the hills, were at their loveliest
and most favorable. It looks more like the haunt of
a robber and his caterans, probably, in its more common
garb of Scotch mist; but, to my eye, it was a
scene of the most Areadian peace and serenity. I
dawdled along the five miles upon my donkey, with
something of an ache in my back, but a very healthful
and sunny freedom from pain and impatience at
my heart. And so did not Baillie Nicol Jarvey make
the same memorable journey.