autiful shores, wherever there
is not a town or a village, are dotted with trim white villas,
glimmering here and there among the trees. The angles of the lochs,
where these diverge from the parent stream, are covered with houses.
The Gair Loch, which we remember as one of the sweetest mysteries of a
mountain lake whose banks ever echoed to the songs of poetry and love,
is a snug suburban retreat. The entrance of the Holy Loch, and of the
dark and awful Loch Long, are fortified against the spirit of nature
by groups of streets. At the heretofore quiet village of Dunoon,
slumbering at the foot of its almost obliterated castle, you might
lose yourself in the wilderness of new habitations. Gourock, on the
opposite side, where in our boyhood the fairies disported round the
Kempuck Stane, is a bustling town, with a suburb stretching along the
Clyde, nearly as long as the long town of Kirkaldy, on the Forth; and
at Largs, the barrows of the ancient Danes have become the cellars of
the sons of little men, who confine spirits in them, as the prophet
Solomon used to do, with a sealed cork. The once solitary island of
Cumbrae is the town of Milport; the hoary ruins of Rothsay Castle are
almost buried in a congeries of seaport streets and lanes; and,
smoking, sputtering, and flapping their water-wings, scores of
steamers ply in endless succession among these and a multitude of
other places of renown.

All this, we may be told, is as it should be; a house is better than a
hut, and the conveniences of civilised life better than roughing it in
the desert: but we will not be comforted. Roughing it! that is just
what the smoke-dried citizen wants occasionally, to prevent his blood
from stagnating, and keep his faculties in working order. Physically,
at least, we are not half the men we were when we used to rumble, and
sometimes tumble, in stage-coaches, exposed to all the excitement and
adventures of a journey; or to get as sick as forty dogs, tossing
about whole days and nights in a sailing vessel. Then, when we landed,
how delightful were the miseries of a cottage; the makeshifts, the
squeezing, the dirt, the hunger--that veal-pie was _always_ left
behind!--the hunting of the neighbourhood for eggs for the children,
the compulsory abstinence for three days out of four from
butcher-meat, and the helpless dependence upon the chapter of
accidents for everything else!

Now, we get into a railway carriage, or the cabin of a steamer, and