while en route for Balmoral,
having gone sixty miles out of her way to comfort him with such an
expression of her sympathy.

The next day I reached the northern boundary of the Duke of Atholl's
estates, having walked for full forty miles continuously through it.
Passed over a very bleak, treeless, barren waste of mountain and
moorland, most of it too rocky or soilless for even heather. The
dashing, flashing, little Garry, which I had followed for a day or
two, thinned and narrowed down to a noisy brook as I ascended
towards its source. For a long distance the country was exceedingly
wild and desolate. Terrible must be the condition of a man
benighted therein, especially in winter. There were standing
beacons all along the road for miles, to indicate the track when it
was buried in drifting snow. These were painted posts, about six or
eight feet high, planted on the rocky, river side of the road, at a
few rods interval, to guide the traveller and keep him from dashing
over the concealed precipices. About the middle of the afternoon I
reached the summit of the two watersheds, where a horse's hoof might
so dam a balancing stream as to send it southward into the Tay or
northward into the Moray Firth. Soon a rivulet welled out in the
latter direction with a decided current. It was the Spey. A few
miles brought me suddenly into a little, glorious world of beauty.
The change of theatrical sceneries could hardly have produced a more
sudden and striking contrast than this presented to the wild, cold,
dark waste through which I had been travelling for a day. It was
Strathspey; and I doubt if there is another view in Scotland, of the
same dimensions, to equal it. It was indescribably grand and
beautiful, if you could blend the meaning of these two commonly-
coupled adjectives into one qualification, as you can blend two
colors on the easel. To get the full enjoyment of the scene at one
draught, you should enter it first from the south, after having
travelled for twenty miles without seeing a sheaf of wheat or patch
of vegetation tilled by the hand of man. I know nothing in America
to compare it with or to help the American reader to an approximate
idea of it. Imagine a land-lake, apparently shut in completely by a
circular wall of mountains of every stature, the tallest looking
over the shoulders of the lower hills, like grand giants standing in
steel helmets and green doublets and gilded corselets, to see the
sof