their hands to facilitate the
leaping of the chasms in the glaciers--looking all the time as if the
whole were some disagreeable dream, from which they hoped to awaken in
their easy-chair in the back office in Crane Alley. No! when personages
of this kind adopt the pilgrim's staff, we may be sure that there is a
good fund of pedestrianism still unexhausted, could the means of
stimulating it be found. But it is high time that we should point out
the way to our favourite land of precipices, cataracts, and snow.

We shall suppose the traveller to be at Braemar, which he may have
reached by the Deeside road from Aberdeen, or in the direction of Spital
of Glenshee through the pass of the Vhrich-vhruich, (have the goodness,
reader, to pronounce that aloud,) or from the basin of the Tay by the
ancient Highland road through Glen Tilt, and the Ault-Shiloch-Vran. Even
the scenery round Braemar is in every way worthy of respect. The hills
are fine, there are noble forests of pine and birch, and some good
foaming waterfalls; while over all preside in majesty the precipices and
snow of Lochin-ye-gair. Still it is farther into the wilderness, at the
place where the three counties of Aberdeen, Inverness, and Banff meet,
that the traveller must look for the higher class of scenery of which we
are sending him in search. As Braemar, however, contains the latest inn
that will greet him in his journey, he must remember here to victual
himself for the voyage; and, partial as we are to pedestrianism, we
think he may as well take a vehicle or a Highland poney as far on his
route as either of them can go: it will not long encumber him. The linn
of Dee, where the river rushes furiously between two narrow rocks, is
generally the most remote object visited by the tourist on Dee-side.
There is little apparent inducement to farther progress. He sees before
him, about a mile farther on, the last human habitation--a shepherd's
cabin, without an inch of cultivated land about it; and he is told that
all beyond that is barrenness and desolation, until he reach the valley
of the Spey. The pine-trees at the same time decrease in number, the
hills become less craggy and abrupt, and the country in general assumes
a bleak, bare, windy, bog-and-moor appearance, that is apt to make, one
uncomfortable.

Of the various methods of approaching Ben Muich Dhui, the most striking,
in our opinion, is one with which we never found any other person so
well acquainted