Oban, September 4, 1890.—Going westward from Stronachlacher, a drive of several delicious miles, through the country of Rob Roy, ends at Inversnaid and the shore of Loch Lomond. The rain had passed, but under a dusky, lowering sky the dense white mists, driven by a fresh morning wind, were drifting along the heath-clad hills, like a pageant of angels trailing robes of light. Loch Arklet and the little shieling where was born Helen, the wife of the Macgregor, were soon passed,—a peaceful region smiling in the vale; and presently, along the northern bank of the Arklet, whose copious, dark, and rapid waters, broken into foam upon their rocky bed, make music all the way, I descended that precipitous road to Loch Lomond which, through many a devious turning and sudden peril in the fragrant coppice, reaches safety at last, in one of the wildest of Highland glens. This drive is a chief delight of Highland travel, and it appears to be one that "the march of improvement,"—meaning the extension of railways,—can never abolish;[306] for, besides being solitary and beautiful, the way is difficult. You easily divine what a sanctuary that region must have been to the bandit chieftain, when no road traversed it save perhaps a sheep-track or a path for horses, and when it was darkly covered with the thick pines of the Caledonian forest. Scarce a living creature was anywhere visible. A few hardy sheep, indeed, were grazing on the mountain slopes; a few cattle were here and there couched among the tall ferns; and sometimes a sable company of rooks flitted by, cawing drearily overhead. Once I saw the slow-stepping, black-faced, puissant Highland bull, with his menacing head and his dark air of suspended hostility and inevitable predominance. All the cataracts in those mountain glens were at the flood, because of the continuous heavy rains of an uncommonly wet season, and at Inversnaid the magnificent waterfall,—sister to Lodore and Aira Force,—came down in great floods of black and silver, and with a long resounding roar that seemed to shake the forest. Soon the welcome sun began to pierce the mists; patches of soft blue sky became visible through rifts in the gray; and a glorious rainbow, suddenly cast upon a mountain-side of opposite Inveruglas, spanned the whole glittering fairy realm with its great arch of incommunicable splendour. The place of Rob Roy's cavern was seen, as the boat glided down Loch Lomond,—a snug nest in the wooded crag,—and, after all too brief a sail upon those placid ebon waters, I mounted the coach that plies between Ardlui and Crianlarich. Not much time will now elapse before this coach is displaced,—for they are building a railroad through Glen Falloch, which, running southerly from Crianlarich, will skirt the western shore of Loch Lomond and reach to Balloch and Helensburgh, and thus will make the railway communication complete, continuous, and direct between Glasgow and Oban. At intervals all along the glen were visible the railway embankments, the piles of "sleepers," the heaps of steel rails, the sheds of the builders, and the red flag of the dynamite blast. The new road will be a popular line of travel. No land "that the eye of heaven visits" is lovelier than this one. But it may perhaps be questioned whether the exquisite loveliness of the Scottish Highlands will not become vulgarised by over-easiness of accessibility. Sequestration is one of the elements of the beautiful, and numbers of people invariably make common everything upon which they swarm. But nothing can debase the unconquerable majesty of those encircling mountains. I saw "the skyish head" of Ben More, at one angle, and of Ben Lui at another, and the lonely slopes of the Grampian hills; and over the surrounding pasture-land, for miles and miles of solitary waste, the thick, ripe heather burnished the earth with brown and purple bloom and filled the air with dewy fragrance.

This day proved capricious, and by the time the railway train from Crianlarich had sped a little way into Glen Lochy the landscape was once more drenched with wild blasts of rain. Loch-an-Beach, always gloomy, seemed black with desolation. Vast mists hung over the mountain-tops and partly hid them; yet down their fern-clad and heather-mantled sides the many snowy rivulets, seeming motionless in the impetuosity of their motion, streamed in countless ribands of silver lace. The mountain ash, which is in perfect bloom in September, bearing great pendent clusters of scarlet berries, gave a frequent touch of brilliant colour to this wild scenery. A numerous herd of little Highland steers, mostly brown and black, swept suddenly into the picture, as the express flashed along Glen Lochy, and at beautiful Dalmally the sun again came out, with sudden transient gleams of intermittent splendour; so that gray Kilchurn and the jewelled waters of sweet Loch Awe, and even the cold and grim grandeur of the rugged Pass of Brander, were momentarily clothed with tender, golden haze. It was afternoon when I alighted in the seaside haven of Oban; yet soon, beneath the solemn light of the waning day, I once more stood amid the ruins of Dunstaffnage Castle and looked upon one of the most representative, even as it is one of the most picturesque, relics of the feudal times of Scottish history. You have to journey about three miles out of the town in order to reach that place, which is upon a promontory where Loch Etive joins Loch Linnhe. The carriage was driven to it through a shallow water and across some sands which soon a returning tide would deeply submerge. The castle is so placed that, when it was fortified, it must have been well-nigh impregnable. It stands upon a broad, high, massive, precipitous rock, looking seaward toward Lismore island. Nothing of that old fortress now remains except the battlemented walls, upon the top of which there is a walk, and portions of its towers, of which originally there were but three. The roof and the floors are gone. The courtyard is turfed, and over the surface within its enclosure the grass grows thick and green, while weeds and wild-flowers fringe its slowly mouldering walls, upon which indeed several small trees have rooted themselves, in crevices stuffed with earth. One superb ivy-tree, of great age and size, covers much of the venerable ruin, upon its inner surface, with a wild luxuriance of brilliant foliage. There are the usual indications in the masonry, showing how the area of this castle was once subdivided into rooms of various shapes and sizes, some of them large, in which were ample fireplaces and deeply recessed embrasures, and no doubt arched casements opening on the inner court. Here dwelt the early kings of Scotland. Here the national story of Scotland began. Here for a long time was treasured the Stone of Destiny, Lia Fail, before it was taken to Scone Abbey, thence to be borne to London by Edward the First, in 1296, and placed where it has ever since remained, and is visible now, in the old coronation chair in the chapel of Edward the Confessor, at Westminster. Here through the slow-moving centuries many a story of love, ambition, sorrow, and death has had its course and left its record. Here, in the stormy romantic period that followed 1745, was imprisoned for a while the beautiful, intrepid, constant, and noble Flora Macdonald, who had saved the person and the life of the fugitive Pretender, after the fatal defeat and hideous carnage of Culloden. What pageants, what festivals, what glories, and what horrors have those old walls beheld! Their stones seem agonised with ghastly memories and weary with the intolerable burden of hopeless age; and as I stood and pondered amid their gray decrepitude and arid desolation,—while the light grew dim and the evening wind sighed in the ivy and shook the tremulous wall-flowers and the rustling grass,—the ancient, worn-out pile seemed to have a voice, and to plead for the merciful death that should put an end to its long, consuming misery and dumb decay. Often before, when standing alone among ruins, have I felt this spirit of supplication, and seen this strange, beseechful look, in the silent, patient stones: never before had it appealed to my heart with such eloquence and such pathos. Truly nature passes through all the experience and all the moods of man, even as man passes through all the experience and all the moods of nature.

On the western side of the courtyard of Dunstaffnage stands a small stone building, accessible by a low flight of steps, which bears upon its front the sculptured date 1725, intertwined with the letters AE. C. and LC., and[312] the words Laus Deo. This was the residence of the ancient family of Dunstaffnage, prior to 1810. From the battlements I had a wonderful view of adjacent lakes and engirdling mountains,—the jewels and their giant guardians of the lonely land of Lorn,—and saw the red sun go down over a great inland sea of purple heather and upon the wide waste of the desolate ocean. These and such as these are the scenes that make this country distinctive, and that have stamped their impress of stately thought and romantic sentiment upon its people. Amid such scenes the Scottish national character has been developed, and under their influence have naturally been created the exquisite poetry, the enchanting music, the noble art and architecture, and the austere civilisation of imperial Scotland.

After dark the rain again came on, and all night long, through light and troubled slumber, I heard it beating on the window-panes. The morning dawned in gloom and drizzle, and there was no prophetic voice to speak a word of cheer. One of the expeditions that may be made from Oban comprises a visit to Fingal's Cave, on the island of Staffa, and to the ruined cathedral on Saint Columba's island of Iona, and, incidentally, a voyage around the great island of Mull. It is the most beautiful, romantic, diversified, and impressive sail that can be made in these waters. The expeditious itinerant in Scotland waits not upon the weather, and at an early hour this day I was speeding out of Oban, with the course set for Lismore Light and the Sound of Mull.[51]