e houses of people living decently upon a decent trade; but the
windows and door-steads were as dirty as in a dirty by-street of a large
town, making a most unpleasant contrast with the comely face of the
buildings towards the water, and the ducal grandeur and natural festivity
of the scene. Smoke and blackness are the wild growth of a Highland hut:
the mud floors cannot be washed, the door-steads are trampled by cattle,
and if the inhabitants be not very cleanly it gives one little pain; but
dirty people living in two-storied stone houses, with dirty sash windows,
are a melancholy spectacle anywhere, giving the notion either of vice or
the extreme of wretchedness.

Returning through the town, we went towards the Castle, and entered the
Duke's grounds by a porter's lodge, following the carriage-road through
the park, which is prettily scattered over with trees, and slopes gently
towards the lake. A great number of lime-trees were growing singly, not
beautiful in their shape, but I mention them for the resemblance to one
of the same kind we had seen in the morning, which formed a shade as
impenetrable as the roof of any house. The branches did not spread far,
nor any one branch much further than another; on the outside it was like
a green bush shorn with shears, but when we sate upon a bench under it,
looking upwards, in the middle of the tree we could not perceive any
green at all; it was like a hundred thousand magpies' nests clustered and
matted together, the twigs and boughs being so intertwined that neither
the light of the mid-day sun nor showers of hail or rain could pierce
through them. The lime-trees on the lawn resembled this tree both in
shape and in the manner of intertwisting their twigs, but they were much
smaller, and not an impenetrable shade.

The views from the Castle are delightful. Opposite is the lake, girt
with mountains, or rather smooth high hills; to the left appears a very
steep rocky hill, called Duniquoich Hill, on the top of which is a
building like a watch-tower; it rises boldly and almost perpendicular
from the plain, at a little distance from the river Arey, that runs
through the grounds. To the right is the town, overtopped by a sort of
spire or pinnacle of the church, a thing unusual in Scotland, except in
the large towns, and which would often give an elegant appearance to the
villages, which, from the uniformity of the huts, and the frequent want
of tall trees, they seldom exhibi