tourist, owes to it all that is peculiar in its
appearance--its tall pyramidal quartz mountains, that rise at one
stride, steep, and well-nigh as naked as the old Pyramids, from nearly
the level of the sea, to heights on which at midsummer the snows of
winter gleam white in streaks and patches; and a picturesque sandstone
tract of precipitous hills, which flanks its western shore, and bore at
this period the remains of one of the old pine forests. A continuous
wall of gneiss mountains, that runs along the eastern side of the lake,
sinks sheer into its brown depths, save at one point, where a level
tract, half-encircled by precipices, is occupied by fields and
copsewood, and bears in the midst a white mansion-house; the blue
expanse of the lake greatly broadens in its lower reaches; and a group
of partially submerged hillocks, that resemble the forest-covered ones
on its western shores, but are of lower altitude, rise over its waters,
and form a miniature archipelago, grey with lichened stone, and bosky
with birch and hazel. Finding at the head of the loch that no horse and
cart had ever forced their way along its sides, we had to hire a boat
for the transport of at least cart and baggage; and when the boatmen
were getting ready for the voyage, which was, with the characteristic
dilatoriness of the district, a work of hours, we baited at the clachan
of _Kinlochewe_--a humble Highland inn, like that in which we had passed
the night. The name--that of an old farm which stretches out along the
_head_ or upper end of Loch Maree--has a remarkable etymology: it means
simply the head of _Loch Ewe_--the salt-water loch into which the waters
of Loch Maree empty themselves by a river little more than a mile in
length, and whose present _head_ is some sixteen or twenty miles distant
from the farm which bears its name. Ere that last elevation of the
land, however, to which our country owes the level marginal strip that
stretches between the present coast-line and the ancient one, the sea
must have found its way to the old farm. Loch Maree (Mary's Loch), a
name evidently of mediaeval origin, would then have existed as a
prolongation of the marine Loch Ewe, and _Kinlochewe_ would have
actually been what the compound words signify--the head of Loch Ewe.
There seems to be reason for holding that, ere the latest elevation of
the land took place in our island, it had received its first human
inhabitants--rude savages, who employed tools and