hat we found it impossible to shake
them off; but the hardship in our case was, that all the subordinate
parts of the scenery, many of them dull and dreary enough, and some of
them intolerably tedious, had taken it upon themselves so to thrust
their intimacy upon us, in all winds and weathers, that without giving
them the cut direct there was no way of escaping from the burden of
their friendship. To courteous and humane Christians, such as we have
always been both by name and nature as far back as we can recollect, it
is painful to cut even an impudent stone, or an upsetting tree that may
cross our path uncalled for, or obtrude itself on our privacy when we
wish to be alone in our meditations. Yet, we confess, they used
sometimes sorely to try our temper. It is all very well for you, our
good sir, to say in excuse for them that such objects are inanimate. So
much the worse. Were they animate, like yourself, they might be reasoned
with on the impropriety of interrupting the stream of any man's
soliloquies. But being not merely inanimate but irrational, objects of
that class know not to keep their own place, which indeed, it may be
said in reply, is kept for them by nature. But that Mistress of the
Ceremonies, though enjoying a fine green old age, cannot be expected to
be equally attentive to the proceedings of all the objects under her
control. Accordingly, often when she is not looking, what more common
than for a huge hulking fellow of a rock, with an absurd tuft of trees
on his head, who has observed you lying half-asleep on the greensward,
to hang eavesdropping, as it were, over your most secret thoughts,
which he whispers to the winds, and they to all the clouds! Or for some
grotesque and fantastic ash, with a crooked back, and arms
disproportionately long, like a giant in extreme old age dwindling into
a dwarf, to jut out from the hole in the wall, and should your leaden
eye chance at the time to love the ground, to put his mossy fist right
in your philosophical countenance! In short, it is very possible to know
a country so thoroughly well, outside and in, from mountain to
mole-hill, that you get mutually tired of one another's company, and are
ready to vent your quarrel in reciprocal imprecations.

So was it once with us and the Highlands. That "too much familiarity
breeds contempt" we learned many a long year ago, when learning to write
large text; and passages in our life have been a running commentary on
the