the _Scotsman_, advising the
removal of a couple of shabby trees which obstruct the view of that
beautiful triple end window which Mr. Ruskin and everybody else admires,
and by the time he has written this letter in his mind, and turned the
sentences to it, he will find himself at Callander and the carriage all
ready. Giving the order for the _Port of Monteith_, he will rattle
through this hard-featured, and to our eye comfortless village, lying
ugly amid so much grandeur and beauty, and let him stop on the crown of
the bridge, and fill his eyes with the perfection of the view up the
Pass of Leny--the Teith lying diffuse and asleep, as if its heart were
in the Highlands and it were loath to go, the noble Ben Ledi imaged in
its broad stream. Then let him make his way across a bit of pleasant
moorland--flushed with maidenhair and white with cotton grass, and
fragrant with the _Orchis conopsia_, well deserving its epithet
_odoratissima_.

He will see from the turn of the hill-side the Blair of Drummond waving
with corn and shadowed with rich woods, where eighty years ago there was
a black peat-moss; and far off, on the horizon, Damyat and the Touch
Fells; and at his side the little loch of Ruskie, in which he may see
five Highland cattle, three tawny brown and two brindled, standing in
the still water--themselves as still, all except their switching tails
and winking ears--the perfect images of quiet enjoyment. By this time he
will have come in sight of the Lake of Monteith, set in its woods, with
its magical shadows and soft gleams. There is a loveliness, a gentleness
and peace about it more like "lone St. Mary's Lake," or Derwent Water,
than of any of its sister lochs. It is lovely rather than beautiful, and
is a sort of gentle prelude, in the _minor_ key, to the coming glories
and intenser charms of Loch Ard and the true Highlands beyond.

You are now at the Port, and have passed the secluded and cheerful
manse, and the parish kirk with its graves, close to the lake, and the
proud aisle of the Grahams of Gartmore washed by its waves. Across the
road is the modest little inn, a Fisher's Tryst. On the unruffled water
lie several islets, plump with rich foliage, brooding like great birds
of calm. You somehow think of them as on, not in the lake, or like
clouds lying in a nether sky--"like ships waiting for the wind." You get
a coble, and a _yauld_ old Celt, its master, and are rowed across to
_Inchmahome, the Isle of Res