at
Inverary, and did not set off till nine o'clock, having, as usual, to
complain of the laziness of the servants. Our road was up the valley
behind the Castle, the same we had gone along the evening before.
Further up, though the plantations on the hills are noble, the valley was
cold and naked, wanting hedgerows and comfortable houses. We travelled
several miles under the plantations, the vale all along seeming to belong
almost exclusively to the Castle. It might have been better
distinguished and adorned, as we thought, by neater farm-houses and
cottages than are common in Scotland, and snugger fields with warm
hedgerows, at the same time testifying as boldly its adherence to the
chief.

At that point of the valley where the pleasure-grounds appear to end, we
left our horse at a cottage door, and turned a few steps out of the road
to see a waterfall, which roared so loud that we could not have gone by
without looking about for it, even if we had not known that there was one
near Inverary. The waterfall is not remarkable for anything but the good
taste with which it has been left to itself, though there is a
pleasure-road from the Castle to it. As we went further up the valley
the roads died away, and it became an ordinary Scotch glen, the poor
pasturage of the hills creeping down into the valley, where it was little
better for the shelter, I mean little greener than on the hill-sides; but
a man must be of a churlish nature if, with a mind free to look about, he
should not find such a glen a pleasing place to travel through, though
seeing little but the busy brook, with here and there a bush or tree, and
cattle pasturing near the thinly-scattered dwellings. But we came to one
spot which I cannot forget, a single green field at the junction of
another brook with the Arey, a peninsula surrounded with a close row of
trees, which overhung the streams, and under their branches we could just
see a neat white house that stood in the middle of the field enclosed by
the trees. Before us was nothing but bare hills, and the road through
the bare glen. A person who has not travelled in Scotland can scarcely
imagine the pleasure we have had from a stone house, though fresh from
the workmen's hands, square and sharp; there is generally such an
appearance of equality in poverty through the long glens of Scotland,
giving the notion of savage ignorance--no house better than another, and
barns and houses all alike. This house