gh we looked, drenched and cold. The
traveller was marching on over the rocky road, his book safe in its
oil-skin cover, and his clothes-bag similarly protected; his face
bright and glowing with exercise, and his summer jacket of linen
feeling, as he told us, all the pleasanter for being wet through. As he
passed each recess of the defile, he looked up perpetually to see the
rain come smoking out of the fissures of the rocks; and when he reached
the opening by which he was to descend to the plain, he stood still, to
watch the bar of dewy yellow light which lay along the western sky where
the sun had just set. He looked just as happy on other days. Sometimes
we passed him lying along on a hill side; sometimes talking with a
family at the door of a log-house; sometimes reading as he walked under
the shade of the forest. I, for one, often longed to dismiss our waggon
or barouche, and to follow his example.

One peculiar advantage of pedestrian travelling is the pleasure of a
gradual approach to celebrated or beautiful places. Every turn of the
road gains in interest; every object that meets the eye seems to have
some initiative meaning; and when the object itself at last appears,
nothing can surpass the delight of flinging one's self on the ground to
rest upon the first impression, and to interpose a delicious pause
before the final attainment. It is not the same thing to desire your
driver to stop when you come to the point of view. The first time that I
felt this was on a pedestrian tour in Scotland, when I was at length to
see mountains. The imagination of myself and my companion had fixed
strongly on Dunkeld, as being a scene of great beauty, and our first
resting-place among the mountains. The sensation had been growing all
the morning. Men, houses, and trees had seemed to be growing
diminutive,--an irresistible impression to the novice in mountain
scenery: the road began to follow the windings of the Tay, a sign that
the plain was contracting into a pass. Beside a cistern, on a green bank
of this pass, we had dined; a tract of heath next lay before us, and we
traversed it so freshly and merrily as to be quite unaware that we were
getting towards the end of our seventeen miles, though still conscious
that the spirit of the mountains was upon us. We were deeply engaged in
talk, when a winding of the road brought us in full view of the lovely
scene which is known to all who have approached Dunkeld by the Perth
road. We