the termination of the valley. It
was a keen frosty morning, showers of snow threatening us, but the sun
bright and active. We had a task of twenty-one miles to perform in a
short winter's day.... On a nearer approach the waters seemed to fall
down a tall arch or niche that had shaped itself by insensible
moulderings in the wall of an old castle. We left this spot with
reluctance, but highly exhilarated.... It was bitter cold, the wind
driving the snow behind us in the best style of a mountain storm. We
soon reached an inn at a place called Hardrane, and descending from
our vehicles, after warming ourselves by the cottage fire, we walked
up the brook-side to take a view of a third waterfall. We had not
walked above a few hundred yards between two winding rocky banks
before we came full upon the waterfall, which seemed to throw itself
in a narrow line from a lofty wall of rock, the water, which shot
manifestly to some distance from the rock, seeming to be dispersed
into a thin shower scarcely visible before it reached the bason. We
were disappointed in the cascade itself, though the introductory and
accompanying banks were an exquisite mixture of grandeur and
beauty.... After cautiously sounding our way over stones of all
colours and sizes, encased in the clearest water formed by the spray
of the fall, we found the rock, which before had appeared like a wall,
extending itself over our heads, like the ceiling of a huge cave, from
the summit of which the waters shot directly over our heads into a
bason, and among fragments wrinkled over with masses of ice as white
as snow, or rather, as Dorothy says, like congealed froth. The water
fell at least ten yards from us, and we stood directly behind it, the
excavation not so deep in the rock as to impress any feeling of
darkness, but lofty and magnificent; but in connection with the
adjoining banks excluding as much of the sky as could well be spared
from a scene so exquisitely beautiful. The spot where we stood was as
dry as the chamber in which I am now sitting, and the incumbent rock,
of which the groundwork was limestone, veined and dappled with colours
which melted into each other with every possible variety of colour. On
the summit of the cave were three festoons, or rather wrinkles, in the
rock, run up parallel like the folds of a curtain when it is drawn up.
Each of these was hung with icicles of various