We never looked forward to a pleasure trip with so much misery as we did to our journey to the Hebrides. We wanted a holiday.

"Go to Scotland," suggested the editor of Harper's.

"Let us rather wander through unexplored France," we proposed, in a long letter, though we had already explored it for ourselves more than once.

"Scotland would be better," was the answer in a short note.

"But why not let us discover unknown Holland?" we asked, as if it had not been discovered a hundred times already.

"Scotland would be better," was still the answer, and so to Scotland we went.

It was a country about which we cared little, and knew less. We had heard of Highlands and Lowlands, of Melrose and Stirling, but for our lives we could not have pointed them out on the map. The rest of our knowledge was made up of confused impressions of Hearts of Mid-Lothian and Painters' Camps in the Highlands, Macbeths and Kidnappers, Skye terriers and Shetland shawls, blasted heaths and hills of mist, Rob Roys and Covenanters; and, added to these, positive convictions of an unbroken Scotch silence and of endless breakfasts of oatmeal, dinners of haggis, and suppers of whiskey. Hot whiskey punch is a good thing in its way, and at times, but not as a steady diet. Oatmeal we think an abomination. And as for haggis—well, we only knew it as it was once described to us by a poet: the stomach of some animal filled with all sorts of unpleasant things and then sewed up. We recalled the real dinners and friendly peasants of France and Italy, and hated the very name of Scotland.

It will easily be understood that we could not plan a route out of our ignorance and prejudice. It remained to choose a guide, and our choice, I hardly know why, fell upon Dr. Johnson. Every one must remember—I say this though we did not even know it until we looked into the matter—that Dr. Johnson met Boswell in Edinburgh, and in his company journeyed up the east coast as far as Inverness, then across the Highlands to the west, and so to the Hebrides, coming back by way of Inverary, Loch Lomond, and Glasgow. It looked a long journey on the map, and seemed a weary one in the pages of Boswell and Johnson; but as if this were not bad enough, we made up our minds, for the sake of novelty, to walk.

Of our preparations for the journey I will say nothing. We carried less than Stanley and more than the average tramp. We took many things which we ought not to have taken, and we left behind many things which we ought to have taken. But this matters little, since our advice to all about to start on a walking tour is, Don't.

On the 28th of July we arrived in

EDINBURGH,

"a city too well known to admit description." If Dr. Johnson thought so a hundred years ago, it is not for us, who propose to be his followers, to differ from him. Indeed, during our stay in that city, so eager were we to be faithful to him in all things that we should have allowed ourselves to be dined, teaed and suppered, even as he was, but for an obstacle. The only person whom we knew in Edinburgh was away, and the fame of our coming had not, as with Dr. Johnson, gone before us.

We were careful to find St. James's Court, where Boswell lived, and where clothes, drying in what sun there is, now hang from his windows. And we went to the old White Horse Inn, where the Doctor, on his arrival, stayed until Boswell came to carry him off in triumph; and where probably the tourist of another year will not go, for already in the court-yard are signs of the coming of the destroyer.

We had resolved to reverse the order of their journey by going to the Western Islands first, and coming home along the east coast. In this way we should avoid the September storms which kept them in the Hebrides. Now we also decided to go straight to Glasgow, and not to stop at Hamilton, where they spent a night.

On Saturday, July 30th, we began our walk in a cab, and continued it for many miles in a railway-carriage. We represented to ourselves that the country between Edinburgh and Glasgow, of which we knew nothing, was stupid, and that we must get to Glasgow for Sunday. There was no earthly reason for this, but it was an excuse, and we made the most of it.

Dr. Johnson says that "to describe a city so much frequented as

GLASGOW

is unnecessary," and again we are willing to take his word for it. But its Cathedral was the first of the many surprises Scotland had in store for us. We had heard of it, but that was all. One young lady of Glasgow, fresh from a tour on the Continent, told us that she had never seen it. We were therefore prepared to find it no great thing. The exterior did not disappoint our expectations, but we have seldom been more impressed with an interior, and this though we had just come from the loveliest churches of England.

The crypt, or rather the under church, is its pride, as indeed it well may be. A verger stood smoking a pipe at the south door, and we told him what we thought. J——, after three years' work in the English cathedrals, felt himself no mean authority.

"It's the finest in the world," said the verger.

"In Great Britain perhaps, but not in Europe," said J——; for we had been but a moment before comparing it, as it now is, a cold, bare, show-place, to the under church of Assisi with the frescos on the walls, the old lamps burning before altars, the sweet smell of incense, and the monks kneeling in prayer.

"I only tell you what those qualified have said," and the verger settled the matter and J——'s pretensions.

It was in the Glasgow crypt Rob Roy gave the warning to Frank Osbaldistone. The guide-book recalled the incident, which we had forgotten. Indeed the farther we went, the more we were reminded that to travel in Scotland is to travel through the Waverley Novels, and that these to us were but a name. Since our return we have tried to read them again, to be quite honest, with but indifferent pleasure. We are so wanting in appreciation that we find Scott's description of the crypt stupid, and we are not thrilled by the daring deeds of the MacGregor.

The Art Gallery in Glasgow was no less a surprise to us than the Cathedral. Its catalogue contains more Titians, Rembrandts. Hobbemas, and other great masters than any other in Europe. But if we wondered at the catalogue, we were still more astonished when we came to see the pictures!

We stayed in Glasgow until Monday morning, when we again took the train, but this time for a few miles only. We bought tickets for Kilpatrick, and a sharp lookout we had to keep for it from the carriage windows. At the stations, no one called the names, which, in true British fashion, were less easy to find than that of the best brand of mustard or of the best hotel in Glasgow. At Kilpatrick, when I pulled my head in after the usual search, J—— was already at the opposite door. He did not care where he was, he said; he would get out. In the distance, we could see Dumbarton Rock rising from the plain against a blue sky. Here, as in our plans for the day's journey, it was the one prominent landmark.

Kilpatrick is said to have been the birthplace of St. Patrick. I do not know what authority Black[C] has for the legend; certainly not that of the villagers. St. Patrick was no British man, one of them told us; and, moreover, he never lived in Kilpatrick, but on the hill. But had we ever heard of Captain Shonstone, the hairbor-maister? He was a great man.

We made a great show of briskness by going the long way round by the canal. This was the only time throughout our journey that we turned from the main road—except to take a short-cut. Mr. Lee Meriwether, in his Tramp Abroad, thought it an advantage of walking that he could leave the road to see whatever was to be seen near, but not from it. For our part, after the first mile, we never took an extra step for any sight; that is, whenever our knapsacks were on our backs. At Dumbarton we did not even climb the rock, though Dr. Johnson walked to the very top. Instead, we lunched and talked politics with the British workman in a coffee tavern.

After Dumbarton, we left the Clyde to follow the Leven. It was just beyond the town we first saw Ben-Lomond, a blue shadow on the horizon when the clouds were heavy above; a high bare mountain, seamed and riven, when the sun shone upon it. We lost sight of it in a succession of long, stupid villages; on the shady road, where the trees met overhead, we could see it again through the net-work of branches. Clouds were low on its heights, and a veil of soft light rain fell before it when, having left our knapsacks in the inn at Balloch, we rowed up the Leven, a little quiet river between low woods and flat meadow-land, to

LOCH LOMOND.

It was the first Scotch lake we saw, and we thought it very like any other lake.

We were off by eight in the morning. It was clear and cool, like an October day at home. Our road lay for a while close to the loch, then turned and went round the parks and lawns that sloped gently to the shore, so that it was only over a stone wall or through a gap in the hedge we could see the blue water and the wooded islands. We were now on the fighting-ground of the Colquhoun and the MacGregor, we learned from Black, who—we know it to our cost—is a better guide to the romance and history of Scotland than to its roads. It is but poor comfort when you ask for a good route to be given a quotation.

Rob Roy is the hero of Loch Lomond, and if you cross—as we did not—to the other side, you may see his cave and his prison and a lot of his other belongings. But I think that which is best worth seeing on the loch is the Colquhoun's village of Luss, with its neat, substantial cottages and trim gardens. In the Highlands you can have your fill of tales of outlaws and massacres and horrors; but it is not every day you come to a village like this, where men are allowed to live a little better than their beasts.

TARBET, LOCH LOMOND.

At the Colquhoun Arms in Luss we ate our lunch, and that was our undoing. It left us in a mood for lounging, and we had still eight miles to go. We found it harder work the second day than the first. Our knapsacks weighed like lead, and did not grow lighter; each mile seemed interminable. This was the more provoking because with every step the way grew lovelier. Almost all the afternoon we were within sight of the loch, while on our left the mountains now rose from the very road-side, and hedges gave place to hill-sides of ferns and heather-patched bowlders. Used as we both were to cycling, the slowness and monotony of our pace was intolerable. We longed for a machine that would carry us and our knapsacks with ease over the hard, dustless road. For one mile we tried to keep each other in countenance. J—— was the first to rebel openly. The Highlands were a fraud, he declared; the knapsack was an infernal nuisance and he was a fool to carry it. About three miles from Tarbet he sat down and refused to go any farther.

Just then, by chance, there came a drag full of young girls, and when they saw us they laughed, and passed by on the other side. And likewise a dog-cart, and the man driving, when he first saw us, waved his hand, taking us to be friends; but when he was at the place and looked at us, he also passed by on the other side. But two tricyclers, as they journeyed, came where we were; and when they saw us they had compassion on us, and came to us, and gathered up our knapsacks and set them on their machines and brought them to the inn and took care of them. And yet there are many who think cyclers nothing but cads on casters!

To tell the truth, had these two men been modern Rob Roys, we would have yielded up our knapsacks as cheerfully; nor would we have sorrowed never to see them again.

As we went on our way lightly and even gayly, we came to the inn at

TARBET,

and were received by a waiter in a dress-coat. It was a big hotel low down by the loch, with Ben-Lomond for opposite neighbor. The company at dinner was made up of Englishmen and Englishwomen. But everybody talked to everybody else. An Englishman, it seems, becomes civilized in the Highlands. There, those he sits down with at dinner, as is the way with Frenchmen, are his friends; at home, he would look upon them as his enemies.

After dinner we went to walk with the cyclers. As a great theatrical moon came sailing up through the sky behind Ben-Lomond, one told us in broad Scotch how from the Jungfrau he had once watched the moon rise, and at the sight had bur-r-r-st into tee-eers. But just then, had I wept at all, it must have been from sheer weariness, so I turned my back upon the beauty of the evening and went to bed.

GLENCROE.

It was well on towards noon the next day before we were on our way.

"It looks like business," said a young lady feeding a pet donkey, as she saw us start.

"It feels like it too," said I, dolefully, for the knapsacks were no lighter, and our feet were tender after the sixteen miles of the day before.

It was two easy miles to Arrochar, a village of white cottages and a couple of inns, one with a tap, the other with a temperance sign. Here we were ferried across Loch Long by a fisherman sad as his native hills. It was a wretched season, he told us; there were few people about. On the west side of the loch, the road was wild, and soon turned up to Glencroe. At the lower end of the pass, sheep browsed on the hill-sides, and in tiny fields men and women were cutting grass. The few cottages were new. But these things we left behind when the road began to wind upward in short, sudden curves. It was shut in on both sides by mountains; the sun glittered on their sheer precipices and overhanging cliffs and on the hundreds of watercourses with which their slopes were seamed. The way was steep, and I thought I should have died before I reached the top. At the last we made a short-cut up to the stone known, out of compliment to Wordsworth, as "Rest and be Thankful." There may be men and women with so much poetry in their souls, that after that stiff climb they will still care to find the appropriate lines in their guide-books, and then have breath enough left to repeat them. But we were too hot and tired to do anything but lie on the grass and, as we rested, look down upon and enjoy the wonderful pictures away beyond and below us.

In this lonely place a little loch lies dark and peaceful among the hills. Restil, its name is; I do not know what it means, but it has a pretty sound. Nothing could be more monotonous to tramp over than the long stretch of road which follows Kinglas Water almost to the shores of Loch Fyne. Our feet were blistered, and now ached at every step. Our shoulders were sorely strained. The things we said are best not written. When the coach from Inverary passed and until it was out of sight, we made a feint of not being tired. But the rest of the way we now grew eloquent in abuse, now limped in gloomy silence.

It was a mistake (which we afterward regretted) going to

CAIRNDOW,

and I do not know why we made it, except that in mapping out our route we had little help from Black. We had to learn from experience, which is but a poor way, if you find out your errors when it is too late to mend them. We were bound to Inverary, Dr. Johnson's next stopping-place. At the top of Glencroe, we should have turned to our left and walked down Hell's Glen to St. Catharine's, where there is a steam ferry to Inverary on the opposite shores of Loch Fyne. As it was, we had turned to our right and walked to a point almost at the top of the loch where there was no ferry, and where five miles lay between us and St. Catharine's. This was the coach road from Tarbet, and the guide-book has but little interest in travellers who go afoot. Though one hears much of walking tours in the Highlands, but few are made. In seven weeks' walking we scarcely met even a tramp.

We felt our mistake the more keenly because of the unpleasantness of the inn. The landlady greeted us warmly; like the ferry-man of the morning, she found there were too few tourists abroad. But her greeting was better than her rooms or her dinner, and she herself was unco' canny.

There was in the inn a young artist whose name she told us. We had never heard it, and this showed our ignorance; for he came from London, where he had won the first prize in an exhibition, and his wife, who was with him, had won the second, and altogether they were very great, and it was small wonder they did not care to dine with unknown travellers who carried sketch-books. But, indeed, I think in no country in the world except Great Britain will one artist not be glad to meet another when chance throws them together. An English artist wrecked on a desert island would not recognize a brother artist in the same plight as "one of the fraternity," unless the latter could make good his claims by the excellence, not of his work, but of his letters of introduction or the initials after his name. Nor does he unbend in the Highlands, where Englishmen of other crafts become so very sociable.

When we walked out after a bad dinner, the eastern hills rose against the pale yellow light of the coming moon. One star sent a shining track across the dark water, over which every now and again the wind marked its passage in long lines of silver ripples. Of all the sweet still evenings of our journey, we shall always remember this as the sweetest and stillest.

LOCH RESTIL.

It was in the morning that the landlady showed her canniness. She sent us off in her boat to be rowed across the loch; this, she said, we should find the shorter way to Inverary. But on the water one of the boys let slip the truth. We should have half the distance to walk if we went straight from Cairndow to St. Catharine's, there to cross by the steam ferry. Judge of our righteous wrath! When they rowed us back to the Cairndow side, the boys were careful to land us a good quarter of a mile below the inn. The worst of it was that once on shore again, we did not know whom to believe, the mother or the children. We were in a fine state of doubt, until a woman in the first cottage we came to reassured us. This was by far the shorter way, and we need not hurry, she added; we could not help reaching St. Catharine's in time for the ferry at eleven.

INVERARY.

She was right. It seemed a short walk by the loch. We stopped only once, that J—— might get an old ruin on the very water's edge. When we came to St. Catharine's we had an hour or more to sit at the inn door. It was one of those hot, misty days, which are not rare during the short Highland summer. The mountains were shrouded in a burning white haze. The loch was like glass. On its opposite shore, Inverary, white and shining, was reflected in its waters; and close by, at the foot of the hills, the turreted castle of the Argylls stood out strongly against the dark wood.

Here we made up our minds to go to Dalmally by coach. It was much too hot to walk. This left us free to take a nearer look at the castle, which, when we saw how painfully it had been restored, we thought less fine. In the town itself, though there is plenty sketchable, there is nothing notable, save the old town-cross, with its weather-worn carvings, which stands upon the shore, with loch and hills for background.

After lunch at the Argyll Arms, suddenly an excursion steamer and the coach from Tarbet poured streams of tourists into the place. Two more coaches dashed out from the hotel stables. The wide street was one mass of excursionists and landlords and waiters, and coachmen in red coats and gray beavers, and guards with bundles and boxes. There was a short, sharp struggle for seats, and in the confusion we came off with the best, and found ourselves on the leading coach, whirling from the glare of the loch, through the cool shade of a wooded glen, to the stirring sounds of the "Standards on the Braes of Mar," shouted by a party of Lowland Sandies who filled the other seats.

At the first pause, the coachman pointed to deer standing quietly under the graceful silver birches that shut in the road.

"Shush-sh-sh-sh!" screamed the Sandies, in a new chorus.

"Why canna ye put salt on their tails?" cried one.

Though later, cows and sheep and ducks fled before their noise, the deer never stirred. And yet, I suppose, in the season the Duke of Argyll and his guests come stalking these tame creatures, and call it sport.[D]

All that afternoon, through the woods of Glenaray and across the purple moorland beyond, afar over the banks and braes and streams around, there rang out the strong voice of Sandy off for a holiday. Highland valleys were filled with the pathetic strains of

Highland hills re-echoed the burden of a loving father's song:

Between songs there were jokes, as at the minstrels.

"Ta-ta, James; au revore," they called to men mowing in the meadows.

"And havna ye a letter for us?" they asked the old woman at a lonely post-office.

To a beggar by the way-side they gave witticisms with their pennies:

If the point of their jokes is not very clear, the fault is not mine; I am trying to be not witty, but realistic.

There was one in the party—a woman, of course—who remembered duty.

"Isn't it bonny country?" she kept asking. "And what's yon bonny glen, my laddie?" and she poked the guard.

"And Sandy, mon, ye're nae lookin' at the scenery," she said to her husband.

"Toot, I clean forgot the scenery," and Sandy broke off in his singing to stare through his field-glass at a bare hill-side.

Almost within sight of Loch Awe we came to a hill that was so steep we all left the coach and walked a couple of miles up the shadeless hot road. An objection sometimes made to cycling is that it is half walking; but in the Highlands you would walk less if you rode a cycle than if you travelled by coach. From the top of the hill we looked down to where, far below, lay Loch Awe and its many islands. In this high place, with the beautiful broad outlook, gypsies had camped. I never yet knew the Romany who did not pitch his tent in the loveliest spot for miles around.

We had no definite plan for the night. We left it to chance, and we could not have done better. At the station at Dalmally we said goodby to our friends, who went gayly to another bonny glen, and we took the train for Loch Awe. It hurried us round the top of the loch in a few minutes to Loch Awe station, where on the platform were crowds of men in conventional tweed knickerbockers and Norfolk jackets, and women in jockey caps and fore-and-afts; and moreover, there were pipers with their pipes under their arms. From the carriage window we had seen the Loch Awe hotel, perched high on the hill-side, and looking down to the gray ivy-grown ruins of Kilchurn. It seemed no place for tourists who carried their baggage on their backs. But hardly had we left the carriage, when up stepped an immaculate creature in blue coat and brass buttons to tell us, with his cap in his hand, that our telegram had been received and the Port Sonachan boat was in waiting. That from all that elegant crowd of travellers he should have picked us out, the only two in the least disreputable-looking and travel-worn, showed, we thought, his uncommon discrimination. If, without knowing it, we had telegraphed to a hotel of which we had never heard, if in consequence a private steam-yacht was now at our disposal, why should we hesitate? Indeed, we had not time, for immediately a sailor seized our shabby knapsacks and carried them off with as much respect as if they had been Saratoga trunks. We followed him into a little yacht, which we graciously shared with an Englishman, his wife, two children, eleven bags, and three bath-tubs.

CROSS AT INVERARY.

The man in the blue coat kindly kept his boat at the pier until J—— had made quite a decent note of Kilchurn Castle. It has its legends, but it is not for me to tell them. Mr. Hamerton, who has written poetry about it and ought to know, declares they are not to be told in prose. Then we steamed down the loch, past the islands, one with a lonely graveyard, another with a large house; past the high mountains shutting in the Pass of Brander, to a hotel perfect of its kind. It stood on a little promontory of its own. A bay-window in the dining-room commanded the view north, south, and west over the loch. As we ate our dinner we could watch the light slowly fade and the hills darken against it. The dinner was excellent, and the people at table were friendly. There was a freedom about the house that made us think of Dingman's Ferry in its best days, of the Water Gap before its splendor came upon it, of Bar Harbor before it was exploited. It was not a mere place of passage, like the hotels at Tarbet and at Loch Awe; but those who came to it stayed for their holiday. All the men were there for the fishing, which is good, and most of them, tired after their day's work, came to dinner in their fishing clothes. Their common sport made them sociable. They were kind to us, but in their kindness was pity that we too were not fishermen. The landlord, who was a Cameron, was neither great nor obsequious. He had interest for this man's salmon and that man's trout, and good counsel for our journeying. He had been game-keeper for many years on the shores of Loch Awe, which he knew and loved. He had seen Mr. Hamerton, and his boats and his painter's camp. Since we have been to Loch Awe we have had an admiration for Mr. Hamerton which his book about it never gave us. Seldom do men show greater love for beauty in their choice of a home than he did, when he set up his tent on the island of the dead. As his books show, he is sufficient unto himself. Before the first month had ended, many might have wearied for other company save that of the hills and the water, the dead and a madman.

SCOTLAND AND THE HEBRIDES.

We left Port Sonachan in the morning. Mr. Cameron walked down to his pier with us, and a Duncan rowed us across to South Port Sonachan, where there is another hotel, and where we took the road to Loch Etive. Again the morning was hot and misty. In the few fields by the way men and women were getting in the hay, and the women, in their white sacks and handkerchiefs about their heads, looked not unlike French peasants. On each hill-top was a group of Highland cattle, beautiful black and tawny creatures, standing and lying in full relief against the sky. Two miles, a little more or less, brought us to a village wandering up and down a weed-grown, stone-covered hill-side. To our left a by-road climbed to the top of the hill, past the plain, bare kirk, with its little graveyard, and higher still to two white cottages, their thatched roofs green with a thick growth of grass, and vines growing about their doors, the loch and the mountain in the background.

But the cottages, which to the right of our road straggled down to a rocky stream below, had no redeeming whitewash, no vines about their doors. The turf around them was worn away. Some were chimneyless; on others the thatch, where the weeds did not hold it together, had broken through, leaving great holes in the roof. On a bench, tilted up against the wall of the lowest of these cottages, sat an old gray-haired man in Tam o' Shanter, his head bent low, his clasped hands falling between his knees. It was a picturesque place, and we camped out a while under an old cart near the road-side. Perhaps it would have been wise if, like Mr. Hamerton, we could have seen only the picturesqueness of the Highland clachan, only the color and sublimity of the huts, only the fine women who live within them. But how could we sit there and not see that the picturesqueness was that of misery, that whatever color and sublimity there might be—and to the sublimity, I must confess, we were blind—were but outward signs of poverty and squalor, and that the huts sheltered not only strong young women, but feeble old men like that pathetic figure with the clasped hands and bent head? We have seen the old age of the poor, when we thought it but a peaceful rest after the work of years. In English almshouses we have found it in our hearts to envy the old men and women their homes; but here despair and sadness seemed the portion of old age. I do not know why it was, but as we watched that gray-haired man, though there was a space of blue sky just above him, and the day was warm and the air sweet, it was of the winter he made us think; of the time soon to come when the cold winds would roar through the pass, and snow would lie on the hills, and he would shiver alone in the chimneyless cottage with its one tiny window. A few miles away, men in a fortnight throw away on their fishing more than these people can make in years. Scotch landlords rent their wild, uncultivated acres for fabulous sums, while villages like this grow desolate. If, when you are in the Highlands, you would still see them as they are in the stupid romance of Scott or in the sickly sentiment of Landseer, or as a mere pleasure-ground for tourists and sportsmen, you must get the people out of your mind, just as the laird gets them off his estate. Go everywhere, by stage and steamboat, and when you come to a clachan or to a lonely cottage, shut your eyes and pass on; else you must realize, as we did—and more strongly as we went farther—that this land, which holiday-makers have come to look upon as their own, is the saddest on God's earth.

Before we left the shade of the cart a little girl went by, and we asked her the name of the village.

"Kilchrennan," she said, with impossible gutturals, and then she spelled it for us.

It was a good sign, we thought; if Highland children to-day are taught to spell, Highland men and women to-morrow may learn to think, and when they learn to think, then, let the landlord remember, they will begin to act.

After Kilchrennan, the road crossed the moorland, Ben-Cruachan towering far to our right. At the foot of the one wooded hill-side in all this heather-clad moor we met with the only adventure of the morning; for it was here we espied in the road, in front of us, a black bull. It fixed its horrid eyes upon us; its horns seemed to stretch from one side of the way to the other. We cast in our minds whether to go forward or through the wood, but we thought it best to get the trees between us, and we fled up the mountain and never stopped until we had left it a goodly space behind; for indeed it was the dreadfullest bull that ever we saw.

We came to another wretched village down by Loch Etive. Here again in the sunshine was an old man. He was walking slowly and feebly up and down, and there was in his face a look as if hope had long gone from him. In England, scarce a town or village is without its charities; but in the Highlands, while deer and grouse are protected by law, men are chased from their homes,[E] the aged and infirm are left to shift for themselves. I think the misery of these villages is made to seem but the greater because of the large house which so often stands close by. We looked from the weary, silent old man and the row of tiny bare cottages, to a gay young girl and a young man in a kilt, who together strolled lazily towards the large house just showing through the trees.

KILCHRENNAN.

When Mr. Hamerton wrote his "Painters' Camp in the Highlands" he suggested a new route from Oban to Ballachulish by steamer up Loch Etive, and then by coach through Glen Etive and Glencoe. This is now one of the regular excursions from Oban, and one of the finest, I think, in the Highlands. In the glens we met no fewer than five coaches, so that I suppose the excursion is fairly popular. I wonder that Mr. Hamerton had a thought for the amusement of tourists, who are to him odious, as it seems necessary they should be to all right-minded writers of travel. Now, he might find loch and glens less fine. For the rest of that day, being tourists ourselves, we bore with all others patiently.

With Taynuilt we left behind even the sparse cultivation of the Highlands. From the boat we saw that the mountain-slopes were unbroken by road or path; there was scarce a house in sight. Through Glen Etive the road was very rough, the mountains were barren, and not a sheep or cow was on the lower grassy hill-sides. It was all a deer forest, the guard told us, and even the English tourists in the coach exclaimed against the waste of good ground. It is well to go first through Glen Etive. Bare as it seemed to us, it was green when compared to

GLENCOE,

where rocks lay on the road and in the stream and on the hill-sides. The mountains rose bare and precipitous from their very base, and trees and grass found no place to grow.

The guard gave us the story of the massacre, with additions and details of his own which I have forgotten. At the end of the drive he charged two shillings—for his trouble, I suppose. People write of the emotions roused by scenery and associations. I think it is afterwards, by reading up on the subject, that one becomes first conscious of them. However that may be, of one thing I am certain: we have rarely been more flippant than we were on that day. In Glen Etive J—— discovered that Highland streams, where clear brownish water flows over a bed of yellow, green, and red stones, look like rivers of Julienne soup. In the high moor at the head of the Glen we were chiefly concerned with a lunch of milk and scones for a shilling, and grumblings over Highland extortion. In Glencoe, guard and driver pointed out the old man of the mountain, who is here the Lord Chancellor, and Ossian's Cave, on high in the rocky wall, and stopped to show us the Queen's View. But we were more interested in two cyclers pushing their machines up the steepest, stoniest bit of road; in a man in a long black frock-coat and silk hat with crape band, who carried an alpenstock with an umbrella strapped to it, and strode solemnly up the pass; in a species of gypsy van near Glencoe Inn, in which, the guard explained, twelve people and a driver travelled for pleasure. A girl looking very pale and wrapped in shawls sat at the inn door. The party had stopped on her account, he said; the drive had made her ill—and no wonder, we thought.

LOCH LEVEN, FROM BALLACHULISH.

The stony pass led to a pleasant green valley, from which the road set out over the Bridge of Glencoe for the shores of Loch Leven and

BALLACHULISH.

Almost at once it brought us to a field overlooking the loch, where, apparently for our benefit, sports were being held.

The droning of the pipes made quite a cheerful sound, the plaids of the men a bright picture; and when, two miles beyond, we found the hotel with its windows turned towards the loch, we made up our minds not to push on to Oban, but to stay and spend Sunday here.

And so we had a second and longer look at the sports. Young men vaulted with poles; others, in full costume, danced Highland flings and the sword dance. Two pipers took turns in piping. One had tied gay green ribbons to his pipe, and he fairly danced himself as he kept time with his foot. And while we watched we heard but Gaelic spoken. We were in a foreign country.

OBAN.

The position of the hotel was the best thing about it. At dinner an irate clergyman and his daughter took fresh offence at every course, until, when it came to the rice-pudding, they could stand it no longer and left the table. We were less nice, and made a hearty meal; but we thought so poorly of it that the next day, which was Sunday, we found a lunch of bread and cheese and beer more to our taste. This we ate at the inn in Glencoe, in company with the clergyman and his daughter. They were still sore—why, I could not understand—about the pudding, and the clergyman was consoling himself with a glass of good whiskey.

The following day we came to

OBAN—

the most odious place in the Highlands, I have heard it called; the most beautiful place in the world, Mr. William Black thinks. When the west wind blows and the sun shines, there is nothing like it for color, he told J——. We had to take his word for it. We found an east wind blowing and gray mist hanging over town and bay, and we could not see the hills of Mull. When we walked out in the late afternoon, it seemed a town of hotels and photograph shops, into which excursion trains were forever emptying excursionists and never carrying them away again. Crowds were on the parapetless, unsafe embankment; the bay was covered with boats. In front of the largest hotels bands were playing, and one or two of the musicians went about, hat in hand, among the passers-by. Fancy Hassler at Cape May sending one of his men to beg for pennies! It was dull, for all the crowd. The show of gayety was as little successful as the attempt of a shivering cockney to look comfortable in his brand-new kilt.

Altogether, Oban did not seem in the least lovely until we could no longer see it. But as the twilight grew grayer and the tide went out, the great curve of the embankment was marked by a circle of lights on shore and by long waving lines of gold in the bay. At the pier, a steamer, just arrived, sent up heavy clouds of smoke, black in the gathering grayness. The boats one by one hung out their lights. Oban was at peace, though tourists still walked and bands still played.

It was gray and inexpressibly dreary the next day at noon, when we took the boat for Tobermory, in Mull. Through a Scotch mist we watched Oban and its picturesque castle out of sight; through a driving rain we looked forth on the heights of Morven and of Mull. Sometimes the clouds lightened, and for a minute the nearer hills came out dark and purple against a space of whitish shining mist; but for the most part they hung heavy and black over wastes of water and wastes of land. Sir Walter Scott says that the Sound of Mull is the most striking scene in the Hebrides; it would have been fair to add, when storms and mists give one a chance to see it. Pleasure parties sat up on deck, wrapped in mackintoshes and huddled under umbrellas. Our time was divided between getting wet and drying off down-stairs. The excitement of the voyage was the stopping of the steamer, now in mid-stream in "Macleod of Dare" fashion, now at rain-soaked piers. Of all the heroes who should be thought of between these two lands of romance, only the most modern was suggested to us, probably because within a few weeks we had been re-reading Mr. Black's novel. But, just as in his pages, so in the Sound of Mull, little boats came out to meet the steamer. They lay in wait, tossing up and down on the rough waters and manned with Hamishes and Donalds. Into one stepped a real Macleod, his collie at his heels; into another, an elderly lady, who was greeted most respectfully by the Hamish, as he lifted into his boat trunks marked with the name of Fleeming Jenkin. This gave us something to talk about; when we had last seen the name it was in a publisher's announcement, which said that Mr. Stevenson was shortly to write a biographical notice of the late Fleeming Jenkin.

At the piers, groups of people, no better off for occupation than we, waited to see the passengers land. We all took unaccountable interest in this landing. At Salen there was an intense moment when, as the steamer started, a boy on shore discovered that he had forgotten his bag. At the next pier, where a party of three got off, as their baggage was carried after them, we even went the length of counting up to forty bags and bundles, three dogs, and two maids. We left them standing there, surrounded by their property, with the rain pouring in torrents and not a house in sight. This is the way you take your pleasure in the Hebrides. We were glad to see among the boxes a case of champagne. At the last moment, one of the men, from the edge of the pier, waved a brown paper parcel, and told the captain that another like it had been left aboard. I am afraid he had forgotten something else; thence to Tobermory the captain did but revile him.

TOBERMORY

is a commonplace town with a semicircle of well-to-do houses on the shores of a sheltered bay. At one end of the wooded heights that follow the curve of the town is a big hotel; at the other, Aros House, a brand-new castle, in among the trees. The harbor is shut in by a long, narrow island, bare and flat. It seemed a place of endless rain and mist. But when we thought the weather at its worst, the landlady called it pleasant, and suggested a two miles' walk to the light-house on the coast. Children played on the street as if the sun shone. We even saw fishing parties row out towards the Sound.

We had to stay in Tobermory two interminable days, for it was impossible at first to find a way out of it. Our idea was to walk along the north and then the west coast, and so to Ulva; but the landlady was of the opinion that there was no getting from Tobermory except by boat. Fishermen in the bar-room thought they had heard of a rough road around the coast, and knew that on it we should find no inn. The landlord, to make an end of our questions, declared that we must go to Iona by the boat due the next morning at eight. This seemed the only chance of escape unless we were to return to Oban.

In the mean time there was nothing to do, nothing to see. The hotel windows looked out on the gray, cheerless bay, dotted with yachts. Once we walked in the rain to the light-house, and back across the moors. The wind never stopped blowing a gale.

"If anybody wants to know what Mull's like in summer," said J——, in disgust, "all they've got to do is to go to a New Jersey pine barren when an equinoctial's on."

At our early breakfast the next morning, the landlord told us that it was dark outside the bay. It must have been wilder even than he thought. No boat for Iona came.

It was after this disappointment that J——, by chance, in the post-office, met the Procurator Fiscal, whatever he may be. We have good reason to be grateful to him. He mapped out a walking route to Salen, and thence to Loch-Na-Keal, at the northern end of which is the island of Ulva—the soft Ool-a-va which always leads the chorus of the islands in Mr. Black's tragedy, "Macleod of Dare."

We did not care to walk to Salen in the rain; we were not willing to spend another night in Tobermory. Therefore, that same afternoon, when the boat from Skye touched at the pier, we got on board. We believed in the roughness of the sea beyond the Sound when we saw tourists prostrate in the cabin, with eloquent indifference to looks. But it was short steaming to

SALEN,

where we faced wind and rain to walk about a quarter of a mile to the hotel.

Here, as Dr. Johnson said in Glenelg, "of the provisions, the negative catalogue was very copious." The landlady asked us what we should like for supper; she might have spared herself the trouble, since she had nothing to give us but ham and eggs. However, we found the outlook less depressing than at Tobermory. There was no commonplace little town in sight, but only bare rolling grounds stretching to a bay, and on the shores the ruins of a real old castle, of which Mr. Abbey once very unkindly made a drawing, so that J——, for his own sake, thought it best to let it alone. There was, moreover, something to read. Lying with the guide-books were the "Life of Dr. Norman Mcleod," "Castle Dangerous," and the "Life of the Prince Consort." J—— devoured them all three, and the next day regaled me with choice extracts concerning the domestic virtues of the royal family.

When we awoke, the clouds were breaking. Across the Sound of Mull they were low on the heights of Morven, but the hill-sides were green, streaked with sunshine. Above were long rifts of blue sky, and in the bay a little yacht rocked on glittering water. We ate more ham and eggs, and made ready to begin our tramp at once.

Neither maid nor landlord could tell us if there were inns on the road to Bunessan. In Mull a man knows but his own immediate neighborhood. In the hotels, the farthest explorations are to the bed-rooms; in the cottages the spirit of enterprise is less. The interior of the island is an unknown country. The adventurous traveller goes no farther inland than Tobermory on the east coast, or Bunessan on the west. The ordinary traveller never goes ashore at all, but in the boat from Oban makes the tour of Mull in a day. As a consequence, there is no direct communication between the two sides of the island. It is strange that, though one of the largest of the Hebrides and within easiest reach of the main-land, Mull should be one of the least known and civilized. It is not even settled. People respect Dr. Johnson because in the days when steamboats were not, and roads at the best were few, he made a journey to the islands. But we cannot help thinking that if this respect is measured by hardships, we are far more worthy of it for having followed him to Mull a century later. Wherever he and Boswell went, guides and horses, or boats, as the case might be, were at their disposal; the doors of all the castles and large houses in the islands were thrown open to them. We were our own guides. It may be said that the steamboat was at our service, but it could not always take us to places we wished to see. If Dr. Johnson had to ride over moorland on a pony too small for him, he was sure that when evening came a Macquarry, a Maclean, or a Macleod would be eager to make him welcome. We walked on roads, it is true, but they were bad, and not only were we not wanted at the castles, but we did not want to go to them since they are now mostly in ruins; there was chance, too, of our not coming to an inn at nightfall. The inns of Mull are few and far between. Besides, for all one knows, those mentioned in the guide-book may be closed. If others have been opened, there is no one to tell you of them.

COAST OF MULL.

However, we took the procurator's word for the inn at Ulva, and started out again with our knapsacks, which seemed but heavier on our backs after several days' rest. All morning we tramped dreary miles of moor and hill, with the wind in our faces, and by lochs with endless curves, around which we had to go, though we saw our journey's end just before us. While we followed the northern shore of Loch-Na-Keal, high Ben-More, with its head among the clouds, was behind us. In front was the Atlantic, with heavy showers passing over it, and now blotting out far Staffa and the long ridge of the Ross of Mull, an encircling shadow between the ocean and the headland of Gribun; and now sweeping across the loch and the near green island of Inch-Kenneth.

A large house, with wide lawn and green fields and well-clipped hedges, just at the head of Loch-Na-Keal, and one or two small new cottages shut in with flaming banks of fuchsias, showed what Mull might be if in the island men were held in as high account as rabbits and grouse. We saw the many white tails of the rabbits in among the ferns, and though they live only to be shot, on the whole we thought them better off than the solemn, silent men and women who trudged by us towards Salen, where it was market-day, for it is their fate to live only to starve and suffer. The one man who spoke to us during that long morning was a shepherd, with a soft gentle voice and foreign Scotch, whose sheep we frightened up the hill-side.

ULVA

lay so close to the shores of Mull as scarce to seem a separate island. But the waters of the narrow Sound were rough. The postman, who had just been ferried over, held the boat as we stepped into it from the slippery stones of the landing. As he waited, he said not a word. They keep silence, these people, under the yoke they have borne for generations. The ferryman was away, and the boy who had come in his place had hard work to row against wind and waves, and harder work to talk English. "I beg pardon," was his answer to every question we asked.

The little white inn was just opposite the landing, and we went to it at once, for it was late and we were hungry. We asked the landlady if she could give us some meat.

"Of course," she said—and her English was fairly good—she could give us tea and eggs.

"No, but meat," we repeated.

"Yes, of course," she said again; "tea and eggs."

And we kept on asking for meat, and she kept on promising us tea and eggs, and I know not how the discussion had ended, if on a sudden it had not occurred to us that for her the word had none other but its Scriptural meaning.

While she prepared lunch we sat on low rocks by the boats drawn up high and dry on the stony beach. At the southern end of the island was Ulva House, white through an opening in a pleasant wood, and surrounded by broad green pastures. Just in front of us, close to the inn, a handful of bare black cottages rose from the mud in among rocks and bowlders. No paths led to the doors; nothing green grew about the walls. Women with pinched, care-worn faces came and went, busy with household work, and they were silent as the people we had met on the road. Beyond was barrenness; not another tree, not another bit of pasture-land was in sight. And yet, before the people were brought unto desolation, almost all the island was green as the meadows about the laird's house; and so it could be again if men were but allowed to cultivate the ground. Where weeds and rushes and ferns now cover the hills and the level places were once fields of grain and grass. To-day only the laird's crops are still sowed and reaped. Once there could be heard the many voices of men and women and children at work or at play, where now the only sounds are the roaring of the waters and the crack of the rifle.[F] Of all the many townships that were scattered from one end of the island to the other, there remains but this miserable group of cottages. The people have been driven from the land they loved, and sent hither and thither, some across the narrow Sound, others far across the broad Atlantic.

The Highlands and the Hebrides are lands of romance. There is a legend for almost every step you take. But the cruelest of these are not so cruel as, and none have the pathos of, the tales of their own and their fathers' wrongs and wretchedness which the people tell to-day. The old stories of the battle-field, and of clan meeting clan in deadly duel, have given way to stories of the clearing of the land that the laird or the stranger might have his shooting and fishing, as well as his crops. At first the people could not understand it. The evicted in Ulva went to the laird, as they would have gone of old, and asked for a new home. And what was his answer? "I am not the father of your family." And then, when frightened women ran and hid themselves at his coming, he broke the kettles they left by the well, or tore into shreds the clothes bleaching on the heather. And as the people themselves have it, "in these and similar ways he succeeded too well in clearing the island of its once numerous inhabitants, scattering them over the face of the globe." There must have been cruelty indeed before the Western Islander, who once loved his chief better than his own life, could tell such tales as these, even in his hunger and despair.

ROSS OF MULL, LOOKING TOWARDS IONA.

I know it is pleasanter to read of bloodshed in the past than of hunger in the present. A lately published book on Ireland has been welcomed by critics, and I suppose by readers, because in it is no mention of evictions and crowbar brigades and horrors of which newspapers make good capital. I have never been in Ireland, and it may be that you can travel there and forget the people. But in the Hebrides the human silence and the desolate homes and the almost unbroken moorland would let us, as foreigners, think of nothing else. Since our return we have read Scott and Mr. Hamerton and Miss Gordon Cumming and the Duke of Argyll, and many others who have helped to make or mar the romance and history of the Highlands. But the true story of the Highlands as they are I think we learned for ourselves when we looked, as we did at Ulva, from the laird's mansion to the crofter's hovel. It is the story of the tyranny of the few, the slavery of the many, which can be learned still more fully from the reports of the Royal Commission, published by the English Government.

When we returned to the inn we had no thought but to get away at once, how, we hardly knew. The landlady suggested three plans. We could wait until the morrow, when the Gomestra men, as she, a native, called them, and not Gometra men, as Mr. Black has it, would row us out to meet the steamboat coming from Iona. How "Macleod of Dare" like this would have been! We could be ferried over the Sound, and walk back by Loch-Na-Keal, the way we had come, then around its southern shores, and so across to Loch Scridain, at the head of which was an inn. Or we could sail across Loch-Na-Keal, and thus cut off many miles of the distance that lay between us and our next resting-place. We must, however, decide at once; there were two gentlemen below who would take us in their boat, but if we did not want them, they must go back to cut the laird's hay. Were we willing to wait until evening, they would take us for half price. The rain now fell on the loch, but we made our bargain with the gentlemen on the spot.

The landlady gave our sailing quite the air of an adventure. We need not be alarmed, she said, as indeed we had not thought of being; the only danger was to the gentlemen coming home. We found them at the landing, ballasting the boat with stones and getting on their oil-skins. We suggested that they should take us all the way to Bunessan, but they would not hear of it. Only the older of the two, an old gray-haired man, could speak English; they would not venture out to sea in such weather, he told us.

As we sailed past the white house we asked him if he had ever heard of Dr. Johnson. He shook his head and then turned to the other man, and the two began to talk in Gaelic. "Toctor Shonson, Toctor Shonson," we heard them say to each other. But they both kept shaking their heads, and finally the old man again said they had never heard of him.

When the wind swept the rain from the hills of Ulva, we could see that on the western side of the island the strange basaltic formation like that of Staffa begins. Near the low green shores of Inch-Kenneth a yacht lay at anchor. It belonged to one of the lairds of Mull, the boatman said. The people, who have barely enough to live on themselves, can still afford to support a yacht for their landlord. How this can be is the real problem of the Hebrides. To solve it is to explain the crofter question without the aid of a Royal Commission.

On the Gribun shore the landing-place was a long row of stones, slippery with wet sea-weed. The old man gave me his arm and led me in safety to the foot of the meadows beyond. He was the gentleman the landlady had called him. A Frenchman could not have been more polite. Nor was there in his politeness the servility, which in England makes one look to honest rudeness with relief. Caste distinctions may be bitterly felt in the homes of the Western Islanders, but in their manner is something of the equality which French republicans love. They can be courteous without cringing. Englishmen call this familiarity. But then the Englishman who understands true politeness is the exception.

It was, if anything, wetter on land than it had been on the water. To reach the road we waded through a broad meadow knee-high in dripping grass. The mist kept rising and falling, and one minute we could see the islands—Ulva and Gometra and Inch-Kenneth and even Staffa—and the next only grayness. In the narrow pass over the headland between Loch-Na-Keal and Loch Scridain the clouds rolled slowly down the mountains on either side, lower and lower, until presently we were walking through them. And as we went, as was proper in the land of Macleod of Dare, a strange thing happened; for scarcely had the clouds closed about us than a great gust of wind swept through the pass and whirled them away for a moment. Then the wind fell, and again we were swallowed up in grayness, and could scarcely see. Just as we were within sight of Loch Scridain, down poured torrents of rain. A little farther on and we were half-way up to our knees in a bridgeless stream that came rushing down the mountains across the road.

HEADLAND OF GRIBUN, FROM ULVA.

We passed two wind-and-rain-beaten villages and occasional lonely cottages, and the ruins of others. Mr. Hamerton says that nothing is more lovely to an artist than a Highland cottage after a rain; but the trouble is, you seldom see it after the rain, for in the Hebrides the rain it raineth every day and always. We came, too, to one big dreary house and a drearier kirk. The rest of the way there was but the wet wilderness, with the wet road following the curves of the loch, and even striking a mile or so inland to cross with the bridge a river which falls into it at its head. The inn was on the opposite shore; a short-cut lay across the water; there were boats moored to the northern bank where we walked, but not a ferryman to be found. A woman in a clean white cap, who stood in a cottage door-way, did not even know if there was a ferry.

Towards evening the rain stopped; the light of the setting sun shone on the hills before us as it seldom does except in pictures of the Hebrides; but on a walking tour when the chance for pleasure comes, one's capacity for enjoyment has gone. At the end of a day's tramp one can see little beauty, save that of a good dinner and a soft bed, both of which are the exception in the Hebrides.

The inn at

KINLOCH

was a two-storied cottage, with kitchen full of women and tap-room full of geese and hens below stairs, dining and sleeping rooms above. The bed-rooms were all occupied—by the family, I suppose, since we were given our choice; but after choosing, everything had to be moved out before we could move in. However, we made a shift to change our shoes and stockings, and in the dining-room we crouched over a big fire, while the steam rose in clouds from our soaked tweeds. The landlady came up at once with whiskey and glasses.

"And will you accept a glass from me?" she asked.

This was the Highland hospitality of which one reads, and it was more to our taste than the whiskey.

For supper of course we had ham and eggs, but it took no less than two hours for the landlady to cook them and to set the table. She was the sister of the landlady at Ulva, she told us. "And it's a good house my sister keeps whatever," she said; and then she wanted to know, "Had the wee laddie, Donald, ferried us over? And we had come from Salen, and were we going to Bunessan? It will be twelve miles to Bunessan whatever. And then to Iona?" It will be a great kirk we should see there, she had heard; but she had never been to Iona. She spoke excellent English, with the soft, drawling accent we thought so pleasant to hear, and we wished she could cook as well as she talked.

While we waited, J——, out of sympathy, fed a lean hound on meat-lozenges. He looked so starved that we could but hope each would prove for him the substantial meal it is said to be on the label of the box, and which we had not yet found it.

After supper it was two hours more before the bedroom was ready, and I think we had rarely been so tired. We sat nodding over the fire, sick with sleep. When we could stand it no longer, we made a raid upon the room while the landlady, who spent most of her time on the stairs, was on her hundredth pilgrimage below, and locked ourselves in. After that, she kept coming back with towels and one thing and another until we were in bed and asleep.

We had ordered more ham and eggs for eight o'clock in the morning, and asked to be awakened at seven. We might have spared ourselves the trouble—no one called us. It was half-past nine before breakfast was on the table, and it would not have been served then had not J—— gone into the kitchen to see it cooked. The only difference between our morning and evening meal was in the bill, where, according to island reckoning, tea and ham and eggs called supper, are worth sixpence more than eggs and ham and tea called breakfast.

At the last moment up came the landlady, again with whiskey and glasses.

"And will you accept a glass from me?"

But indeed we could not. To begin a twelve miles' walk with whiskey was out of the question. We afterwards learned that this was but good form on her part. The true Highlander always expects to drink a wee drappie with the coming and the parting guest. It would have been true politeness for us to accept. However, we did not know it at the time, and the whiskey was bad. She seemed hurt by our refusal. I thought her a shade less cordial when we came to say goodby.

The wind was still blowing a gale, but it drove the clouds beyond the bald mountains towards Ben-More, and brought no showers with it. Everything had grown bright with the morning but the cottages, and they, perhaps because of the contrast with the blue loveliness of water and sky and hills, seemed darker and more desolate than in the rain. Here and there along the loch a few were gathered in melancholy groups, pathless and chimneyless, smoke pouring from door-ways and through holes in the walls, mud at the very thresholds. For every cottage standing there was another in ruins. On the top of a low hill, over which we made a short-cut, was a deserted village, conveniently out of sight of the road. No traveller, unless he chanced upon it as we did, would know of it. It was not high enough or far enough from other cottages for the shielings upon which the Duke of Argyll thinks so much false sentiment has been wasted. We found a few black-faced sheep in possession of the ruins, and before them, I fear, have been driven not merely cattle from summer pastures, but men from their only homes. There were several school-houses between Kinloch and Bunessan, and we half hoped that these were in a measure responsible for roofless walls and desolate hearths. But the truth is, the Duke of Argyll and other landlords of Mull find it less trouble to collect rents from a few large tenants than from many small ones, and to suit their convenience the people have had to go. It is their land; why should they not do with it as they think best?

Almost all this Ross of Mull, on which we now were, belongs to the Duke of Argyll, the defender of Scotland as it was and as it is; and I think in all the Hebrides there is no place more desolate. We saw perhaps more signs of bitter poverty in Skye and in Barra. But in these islands the evicted have settled again upon the crofts of their friends or relations. Often it is because the many are thus forced to live upon land that can scarce support the few that all are so poor. But the Islander loves his home as he once loved his chief, and now hates his landlord, and he must be in extremity indeed before he will go from it. Knowing this, you feel the greatness of the misery in the Ross of Mull, from which the people have flown as if from a plague-stricken land. The greater part of it is silent and barren as the desert. We walked for miles, seeing no living things save a mere handful of sheep grazing on the hills, and the white sea-gulls perched on the low sea-weed covered rocks of Loch Scridain. And beyond the barren waste of land was the sea without a sail upon its waters, and the lonely islands, which we knew were no less desolate. The cruel climate of this far northern country has had little to do with the people's flight. Neither, indeed, has natural barrenness. The soil in the Highlands is not naturally barren, the Duke of Argyll himself has said. The few large farms by the way were good proof of what might be, even in the rocky Ross of Mull.

It seemed odd in the midst of the wilderness to meet two peddlers loaded with gay gilt frames. They thought it a "blowy" day, and so did a man who passed soon after in a dog-cart. But the women in clean white caps whom we met on the road could answer our questions only in streams of Gaelic.

We saw no one else but men and women getting in the harvest, or bending beneath great burdens of sea-weed as they toiled up the hill from the shores of the loch. There was a lonely graveyard by the way; but nowhere does death seem so great a blessing as we thought it must be here.

It was a long twelve miles, and the knapsacks were growing heavier with each day. But we were walking for our lunch; there were no inns on our road. For one reason or another, to me it was our hardest day's work. I think I must have starved had not J—— slung my knapsack on his already heavily laden shoulders. At the last,

BUNESSAN

came as a surprise. We were looking sadly at the endless line of road over the moors in front of us, when we turned a corner, and there was the little white town, with a pleasant inn, close to the waters of Loch Slach.

We had to wait—we were growing used to waiting—for our lunch; but at last when it came it seemed a banquet. We were not asked to eat either ham or eggs. Altogether, we were so well pleased that we brought the day's walk to an end. But it seemed that the maid who came to the door was less pleased with us. Our knapsacks, too large for comfort, were too small for respectability. Our clothes were weather-worn. The landlord bade her show us to a bedroom; but before we had finished our lunch she had locked every door in the house, carefully leaving the keys on the outer side, and, in her zeal, locking one man in. This, however, we did not learn until later, when English people staying in the inn told us what suspicious characters we were. They said she was stupid, which we had already found out for ourselves.

Bunessan is the show-place of the Ross of Mull; steamers occasionally land at a pier on the loch, two miles distant. Tourists come to the inn for the fishing. If they go no farther into the island, they probably carry away with them impressions of well-to-do people and benevolent landlords—the impressions, probably, the Duke of Argyll wishes to produce. After Kilpatrick and the other wretched groups of cottages we had passed in the morning, it did indeed seem happy and prosperous. It may be that we should have been less struck with it and its inn had it not been for the things we had already seen and experienced. Certainly, at dinner, dishes which we thought luxuries were found fault with by the rest of the company. But then they had their own opinion of Bunessan. They had taken it on trust, after hearing it praised; but no sooner had they come than they wished themselves away again. One suggested that friends should be induced to stay for a summer and educate the place, which might thus be made bearable for them in the future; but the others would not hear of it—one trial was quite enough. We were all very confidential about our plans, and took pleasure in mutually discouraging each other. J—— and I were foolish, they said, to go to Iona, where the cathedral was so insignificant that from the steamer they mistook it for the parish church. We, on our side, declared it worse than folly for them to go from Bunessan to Tobermory, the dreariest spot in all the dreariness of Mull. In the end we agreed that our coming to the island was a mistake, and that no one but Mr. Black could have a good word to say for it. Somehow, we made it seem—and it was a comfort to find some one else to abuse—as if he had brought us here under false pretences. But, indeed, whoever thinks to find Mull as it is described in "Macleod of Dare" cannot but be disappointed. Castle Dare must have been not very far from Bunessan, on the Ross of Mull. It was to this very inn Lady Macleod wished to send Gertrude White and her father; and when you have seen the home of the Macleods for yourself, you would have, like Mr. Black, no mercy for Sir Keith, but you would spare his sweetheart.

The fact is, Mr. Black's descriptions are misleading, though I must admit that even as we found fault with him, one of his strange things happened; for, far out beyond the loch and its purple hills we saw Staffa, and the sea below and the sky above it, turned to gold as the sun sank into the Atlantic. But then, as a rule, the things that happen in Mull are less strange than disagreeable. For one evening's loveliness, you must put up with hours of cold and damp discomfort. Of course, if you own a castle or a yacht, you can improve your point of view.

In the morning after this beautiful sunset, the wind blew the rain through the window in gusts over our toilet-table. Again no one called us. The morning hours of the Hebrides are even later than those of London, which we had hitherto supposed the latest in the working world. When we went down-stairs there were cups and saucers and plates on the breakfast-table, but nothing else; when we asked for our bill the maid said we should have it in a wee bittee, which we knew to mean long hours, and J——, as at Kinloch, took matters into his own hands.

For the first time we felt our superiority as we shouldered our knapsacks. Because of the early rain and wind, the other people in the inn had given up the boat to Tobermory. Already, breakfast over, the rain stopped and clouds grew light. We were on our way to Iona while they still made plans to follow us with their babies and bundles.

"ONE OF HIS STRANGE THINGS HAPPENED."

The road lay for six miles over the moors. There were two or three large houses with cultivated fields, a few black dreary cottages, and the ruins of others. But this end of the Ross of Mull was mostly, as when David Balfour walked across it, bog and brier and big stones. The coast was all rock, great piles of red granite jutting out in uneven masses into the sound that separates Iona from the Ross. When we reached it the ferryman had just come and gone. It was the 11th of August, and men with guns, in readiness for the morrow, were getting into a dog-cart, its horses' heads turned towards Bunessan. Two fishermen, in a boat filled with lobster nets, rowed to the tiny landing. We asked them to take us across, but with a word they refused. There was nothing to do but to sit on the rocks and wait, in fear lest the party from Bunessan, with their children and endless boxes and bundles—thirteen, one man told us he had—should overtake us and give us and our knapsacks no chance in the inns of Iona.

Wind and rain blew in our faces. The fishermen made off in their little boat, hugging the rocky shore. Above us, on the granite, were two cottages, no less naked and cold. Across the Sound we looked to a little white town low on the wind-swept water, and to a towered cathedral dark against the gray-green rocks. A steamer had just brought Cook's daily pilgrims to St. Columba's shrine.

---