at noon, with
knapsacks and carpet-bags and umbrellas, all bent on seeing those
beauties of Nature of which Scotland may well be proud.

To leave the train and hurry down the pier, and rush on board the _Iona_,
is the work of a minute, but of a minute rich in marvels. The _Iona_ is
a fine saloon steamer, which waits for the train at Greenock, and thence
careers along the Western Coast, leaving her passengers at various ports,
and picking up others till some place or other, with a name which I can
hardly pronounce, and certainly cannot spell, is reached. It must carry
some fourteen or fifteen hundred people. I should think we had quite
that number on board--people like myself, who had been travelling all
night--people who had joined us at such places as Leicester, or Leeds, or
Carlisle--people who had come all the way in her from Glasgow--people who
had come on business--people who were bent on pleasure--people who had
never visited the Highlands before--people who are as familiar with them
as I am with Cheapside or the Strand--people with every variety of
costume, of both sexes and of all ages--people who differed on all
subjects, but who agreed in this one faith, that to breakfast on board
the _Iona_ is one of the first duties of man, and one of the noblest of
woman's rights. Oh, that breakfast! To do it justice requires an abler
pen than mine. Never did I part with a florin--the sum charged for
breakfast--with greater pleasure. We all know breakfasts are one of
those things they manage well in Scotland, and the breakfast on board the
_Iona_ is the latest and most triumphant vindication of the fact.
Cutlets of salmon fresh from the water, sausages of a tenderness and
delicacy of which the benighted cockney who fills his paunch with the
flabby and plethoric article sold under that title by the provision
dealer can have no idea; coffee hot and aromatic, and suggestive of Araby
the blest; marmalades of all kinds, with bread-and-butter and toast, all
equally good, and served up by the cleanest and most civil of stewards.
Sure never had any mother's son ever such a breakfast before. It was
with something of regret that I left it, and that handsome saloon filled
with happy faces and rejoicing hearts.

In about half-an-hour after leaving Greenock, I was at Kirn, a beautiful
watering-place in Argyleshire, in one of the handsomest villas of which I
was to find my host, and the owner of the _Elena_, one of the finest of