as to exchange opinions with us about it. We did once,
it is true, coax a friend to attempt that route; he had come so far with
us as the edge of the Dee, but disliked crossing it. In the
superabundance of our zeal, we offered to carry him over on our
shoulders; but when we came to the middle of the stream, it so happened
that a foot tripped against a stone, and our friend was very neatly
tilted over our head into the water, without our receiving any
considerable damage, in our own proper person. He thereafter looked upon
us, according to an old Scottish proverb, as "not to ride the water
with;" and perhaps he was right. So we proceeded on our journey alone.
Our method was to cross right over the line of hills which here bound
the edge of the river. Though not precipitous, this bank is very
high--certainly not less than a thousand feet. When you reach the top,
if the day be clear, the whole Cairngorm range is before you on the
other side of the valley, from summit to base, as you may see Mont Blanc
from the Col de Balm, or the Jungfrau from the Wengern Alp. From this
bird's-eye view, you at once understand that peculiar structure of the
group, which makes the valleys so much deeper and narrower, and the
precipices so much more frightful, than those of any other of the
Scottish mountains. Here there are five summits springing from one root,
and all more than four thousand feet above the level of the sea. The
circumference of the whole group is as that of one mountain. We can
imagine it to have been a huge, wide, rounded hill, Ben Muich Dhui being
the highest part, and the whole as smooth and gentle as some of the Ural
range, where you might have a fixed engine, and "an incline," without
levelling or embanking. But at some time or other the whole mass had got
a jerk; and so it is split from top to bottom, and shivered, and shaken,
and disturbed into all shapes and positions, showing here and there such
chasms as the splitting in two of mountains some three thousand feet or
so in direct height must necessarily create. Having to his satisfaction
contemplated the group from this elevation, the traveller may descend
into Glen Lui Beg, as we shall presently describe it.

Returning to the Dee,--about a mile below the Linn, the stream of the
Lui forces a passage through the steep banks and joins the river. We
enter the glen from which this stream flows by a narrow rocky pass,
through which the trees of the Mar forest struggle upw