he back of the inn, and lying on the
fragrant heather looking at the Loch, with its mild gleams and shadows,
and its second heaven looking out from its depths, the wild, rough
mountains of Glenartney towering opposite. Duchie, I believe, was
engaged in minor business close at hand, and caught and ate several
large flies and a humble-bee; she was very fond of this small game.

There is not in all Scotland, or as far as I have seen in all else, a
more exquisite twelve miles of scenery than that between Crieff and the
head of Lochearn. Ochtertyre, and its woods; Benchonzie, the
head-quarters of the earthquakes, only lower than Benvorlich; Strowan;
Lawers, with its grand old Scotch pines; Comrie, with the wild Lednoch;
Dunira; and St. Fillans, where we are now lying, and where the poor
thoroughbred is tucking in her corn. We start after two hours of
dreaming in the half sunlight, and rumble ever and anon over an
earthquake, as the common folk call these same hollow, resounding rifts
in the rock beneath, and arriving at the old inn at Lochearnhead, have a
_tousie_ tea. In the evening, when the day was darkening into night,
Duchie and I,--the S. Q. N. remaining to read and rest,--walked up Glen
Ogle. It was then in its primeval state, the new road non-existent, and
the old one staggering up and down and across that most original and
Cyclopean valley, deep, threatening, savage, and yet beautiful--

"Where rocks were rudely heaped, and rent
As by a spirit turbulent;
Where sights were rough, and sounds were wild,
And everything unreconciled;"

with flocks of mighty boulders, straying all over it. Some far up, and
frightful to look at, others huddled down in the river, _immane pecus_,
and one huge unloosened fellow, as big as a manse, up aloft watching
them, like old Proteus with his calves, as if they had fled from the sea
by stress of weather, and had been led by their ancient herd _altos
visere montes_--a wilder, more "unreconciled" place I know not; and now
that the darkness was being poured into it, those big fellows looked
bigger, and hardly "canny."

Just as we were turning to come home--Duchie unwillingly, as she had
much multifarious, and as usual fruitless hunting to do--she and I were
startled by seeing a dog _in_ the side of the hill, where the soil had
been broken. She barked and I stared; she trotted consequentially up and
snuffed _more canino_, and I went nearer: it never moved, and on coming
quite clo