beauty which the picturesque surroundings of Bennachie
are well able to satisfy. Great tracts of Aberdeenshire are flat,
treeless, and painful in their monotony; in winter, great gusts sweep
the cold plains, and make driving or walking a trying ordeal; the
country is thinly peopled, and the impression of the visitor is that, in
some districts, railway stations are more numerous than villages. Round
Bennachie, however, the scenery is most pleasant and picturesque. The
villages of Oyne and Insch, in which hospitality to strangers is a
religion, are beautifully placed and well-foliaged all around. The
region is, indeed, one of romance, and the little brook of Gadie ripples
on in the radiance and glamour of pathetic song.

HARLAW.

Those who consider, like Ruskin, that the stories of the past add no
inconsiderable item to the beauty of a landscape, as it appears to the
eye and intelligence of modern observers, will not fail to remember the
momentous issues decided at no great distance from the foot of
Bennachie, in 1411. Teutonic and Celtic Scotland came to grips at
Harlaw, near by:--

"The Hielandmen, wi' their lang swords,
They laid on us fu' sair;
And they drave back our merry men
Three acres' breadth and mair.

. . . . . . . . . .

Gin anybody speer at ye
For them we took awa',
Ye may tell them plain and very plain,
They're sleeping at Harlaw."

Burton, in his _History of Scotland_, declares that the check given to
Donald of the Isles at Harlaw, was a greater relief to Scotland than
even Bannockburn was. If the Stuart kings, hard pressed as they were by
England on the south, had been threatened by a formidable Celtic
sovereignty on the north, Holyrood might have been in ruins a good many
centuries earlier. I am not going to shock my Highland friends by saying
it was a good thing for the country that Donald, with the remnant of his
plaids and claymores, had to retreat to the misty straths and islands of
the west. The coalition of Celt and Teuton has taken place in an
unostentatious way, to the advantage of both races: Macfadyen does not
now, as in the days of Dunbar, bide "_far norrart in a neuk_;" he has
come to the Lowlands long ago, and rarely goes North, except on holiday.
And the language, which to the finical ears of James Fourth's
poet-laureate, seemed too terrible even for the devil to tolerate, has
come south, too, and has a chair all to itself in the Uni