Part 4

Callander sits like a watcher at the opening of the glens, and is a rendezvous of tourists. To the right is the Pass of Leny--well worthy of a visit. You ascend a steep path, birch-trees on right and left; the stream comes brawling down, sleeping for a moment in black pools beloved by anglers, and then hasting on in foam and fury to meet her sister in the Vale of Menteith below. When you have climbed the pass, you enter on a green treeless waste, and soon approach Loch Lubnaig, with the great shadow of a hill blackening across it. The loch is perhaps cheerful enough when the sun is shining on it, but the sun in that melancholy region is but seldom seen. Beside the road is an old churchyard, for which no one seems to care--the tombstones being submerged in a sea of rank grass. The loch of the rueful countenance will not be visited on the present occasion. My course lies round the left flank of Benledi, straight on for the Trosachs and Loch Katrine. Leaving Callander, you cross the waters of the Leny--changed now from the fury that, with raised voice and streaming tresses, leaped from rock to rock in the glen above--and walk into the country made immortal by the "Lady of the Lake." Every step you take is in the footsteps of Apollo: speech at once becomes song. There is Coilantogle Ford; Loch Venachar, yonder, is glittering away in windy sunshine to the bounding hills. Passing the lake you come on a spot where the hill-side drops suddenly down on the road. On this hill-side Vich Alpine's warriors started out of the ferns at the whistle of their chief; and if you travelled on the coach, the driver would repeat half the poem with curious variations, and point out the identical rock against which Fitz-James leaned--rock on which a dozen eyeglasses are at once levelled in wonder and admiration. The loveliest sight on the route to the Trosachs is about to present itself. [Sidenote: Loch Achray--the Trosachs.] At a turn of the road Loch Achray is before you. Beyond expression beautiful is that smiling lake, mirroring the hills, whether bare and green or plumaged with woods from base to crest. Fair azure gem in a setting of mountains! the traveller--even if a bagman--cannot but pause to drink in its fairy beauty; cannot but remember it when far away amid other scenes and associations. At every step the scenery grows wilder. Loch Achray disappears. High in upper air tower the summits of Ben-Aan and Ben-Venue. You pass through the gorge of the Trosachs, whose rocky walls, born in earthquake and fiery deluge, the fanciful summer has been dressing these thousand years, clothing their feet with drooping ferns and rods of foxglove bells, blackening their breasts with pines, feathering their pinnacles with airy birches, that dance in the breeze like plumage on a warrior's helm. The wind here becomes a musician. Echo sits babbling beneath the rock. The gorge, too, is but the prelude to a finer charm; for before you are aware, doubling her beauty with surprise, there breaks on the right the silver sheet of Loch Katrine, with a dozen woody islands, sleeping peacefully on their shadows.

[Sidenote: Inversneyd]

On the loch, the steamer _Rob Roy_ awaits you, and away you pant and fume towards a wharf, and an inn, with an unpronounceable name, at the farther end. The lake does not increase in beauty as you proceed. All its charms are congregated at the mouth of the Trosachs, and the upper reaches are bare, desolate, and uninteresting. You soon reach the wharf, and after your natural rage at a toll of twopence exacted from you on landing has subsided, and you have had a snack of something at the inn, you start on the wild mountain road towards Inversneyd. The aspect of the country has now changed. The hills around are bare and sterile, brown streams gurgle down their fissures, the long yellow ribbon of road runs away before you, dipping out of sight sometimes, and reappearing afar. You pass a turf hut, and your nostrils are invaded by a waft of peat reek which sets you coughing, and brings the tears into your eyes; and the juvenile natives eye you askance, and wear the airiest form of the national attire. In truth, there is not a finer bit of Highland road to be found anywhere than that which runs between the inn--which, like the Russian heroes in "Don Juan," might be immortal if the name of it could be pronounced by human organs--and the hotel at Inversneyd. When you have travelled some three miles, the scenery improves, the hills rise into nobler forms with misty wreaths about them, and as you pursue your journey a torrent becomes your companion. Presently, a ruin rises on the hill-side, the nettles growing on its melancholy walls. It is the old fort of Inversneyd, built in King William's time to awe the turbulent clans. Nothing can be more desolate than its aspect. Sunshine seems to mock it; it is native and endued into its element when wrapt in mist, or pelted by the wintry rain. Passing the old stone-and-lime mendicant on the hill-side--by the way, Tradition mumbles something about General Wolfe having been stationed there at the beginning of his military career--you descend rapidly on Loch Lomond and Inversneyd. The road by this time has become another Pass of Leny: on either side the hills approach, the torrent roars down in a chain of cataracts, and, in a spirit of bravado, takes its proudest leap at the last. Quite close to the fall is the hotel; and on the frail timber bridge that overhangs the cataract, you can see groups of picturesque-hunters, the ladies gracefully timid, the gentlemen gallant and reassuring. Inversneyd is beautiful, and it possesses an added charm in being the scene of one of Wordsworth's poems; and he who has stood on the crazy bridge, and watched the flash and thunder of the stream beneath him, and gazed on the lake surrounded by mountains, will ever after retain the picture in remembrance, although to him there should not have been vouchsafed the vision of the "Highland Girl." A steamer picks you up at Inversneyd, and slides down Loch Lomond with you to Tarbet, a village sleeping in very presence of the mighty Ben, whose forehead is almost always bound with a cloudy handkerchief. Although the loch is finer higher up, where it narrows toward Glen Falloch--more magnificent lower down, where it widens, many-isled, toward Balloch--it is by no means to be despised at Tarbet. Each bay and promontory wears its peculiar charm; and if the scenery does not astonish, it satisfies. Tarbet can boast, too, of an excellent inn, in which, if the traveller be wise, he will, for one night at least, luxuriously take his ease.

[Sidenote: The "Cobbler".]

Up betimes next morning, you are on the beautiful road which runs between Tarbet and Arrochar, and begin, through broken, white upstreaming mists, to make acquaintance with the "Cobbler" and some other peaks of that rolling country to which Celtic facetiousness has given the name of "The Duke of Argyle's Bowling-green." Escaping from the birches that line the road, and descending on Arrochar and Loch Long, you can leisurely inspect the proportions of the mountain Crispin. He is a gruesome carle, and inhospitable to strangers. He does not wish to be intruded upon--is a very hermit, in fact; for when, after wild waste of breath and cuticle, a daring mortal climbs up to him, anxious to be introduced, behold he has slipped his cable, and is nowhere to be seen. And it does not improve the temper of the climber that, when down again, and casting up his eyes, he discovers the rocky figure sitting in his accustomed place. The Cobbler's Wife sits a little way off--an ancient dame, to the full as withered in appearance as her husband, and as difficult of access. They dwell in tolerable amity the twain, but when they do quarrel it is something tremendous! The whole county knows when a tiff is in progress. The sky darkens above them. The Cobbler frowns black as midnight. His Wife sits sulking in the mist. His Wife's conduct aggravates the Cobbler--who is naturally of a peppery temper--and he gives vent to a discontented growl. Nothing loath, and to the full as irascible as her spouse, his Wife spits back fire upon him. The row begins. They flash at one another in the savagest manner, scolding all the while in the grandest Billingsgate. Everything listens to them for twenty miles round. At last the Wife gives in, and falls to downright weeping, the crusty old fellow sending a shot into her at intervals. She cries, and he grumbles, into the night. Peace seems to have been restored somehow when everybody is asleep; for next morning the Cobbler has renewed his youth. He shines in the sun like a very bridegroom, not a frown on the old countenance of him, and his Wife opposite, the tears hardly dried upon her face yet, smiles upon him through her prettiest head-dress of mist; and for the next six weeks they enjoy as bright, unclouded weather as husband and wife can expect in a world where everything is imperfect.

[Sidenote: Glencroe.]

You leave the little village of Arrochar, trudge round the head of Loch Long, and proceeding downward, along the opposite shore, and skirting the base of the Cobbler, strike for the opening of Glencroe, on your road to Inverary. Glencoe is to the other Highland glens what Tennyson is to contemporary British poets. If Glencoe did not exist, Glencroe would be famous. It is several miles long, lonely, sterile, and desolate. A stream rages down the hollow, fed by tributary burns that dash from the receding mountain-tops. The hill-sides are rough with boulders, as a sea-rock is rough with limpets. Showers cross the path a dozen times during the finest day. As you go along, the glen is dappled with cloud-shadows; you hear the bleating of unseen sheep, and the chances are, that, in travelling along its whole extent, opportunity will not be granted you of bidding "good-morrow" to a single soul. If you are a murderer, you could shout out your secret here, and no one be a bit the wiser. At the head of the glen the road becomes exceedingly steep; and as you pant up the incline, you hail the appearance of a stone seat bearing the welcome motto, "Rest, and be thankful." You rest, and are thankful. This seat was erected by General Wade while engaged in his great work of Highland road-making; and so long as it exists the General will be remembered--and Earl Russell too. At this point the rough breast of a hill rises in front, dividing the road; the path to the left runs away down into the barren and solitary Hell's Glen, in haste to reach Loch Goil; the other to the right leads through bare Glen Arkinglass, to St Catherine's, and the shore of Loch Fyne, at which point you arrive after a lonely walk of two hours.

[Sidenote: John Campbell.]

The only thing likely to interest the stranger at the little hostelry of St Catherine's is John Campbell, the proprietor of the same, and driver of the coach from the inn to the steamboat wharf at Loch Goil. John has a presentable person and a sagacious countenance; his gray eyes are the homes of humour and shrewdness; and when seated on the box, he flicks his horses and manages the ribbons to admiration. He is a good story-teller, and he knows it. He has not started on his journey a hundred yards when, from something or another, he finds you occasion for a story, which is sure to produce a roar of laughter from those alongside of, and behind, him. Encouraged by success, John absolutely coruscates, anecdote follows anecdote as flash of sheet-lightning succeeds flash of sheet-lightning on a summer night; and by the time he is half-way, he is implored to desist by some sufferer whose midriff he has convulsed. John is naturally a humorist; and as every summer and autumn the Highlands are overrun with tourists, he, from St Catherine's to Loch Goil, surveys mankind with extensive view. In his time he has talked with most of our famous men, and can reproduce their tones to perfection. It is curious to notice how literary and political greatness picture themselves in the eyes of a Highland coachman! The lion who entrances the _soirées_ has his mane clipped. For John Campbell, cliques and coteries, and the big guns of the reviews, exist not. To him Fame speaks in Gaelic, and concerns herself mainly with sheep and black cattle. What is the good of being a distinguished novelist if you cannot swallow a glass of bitters of a morning? John will distinguish between Tupper and Tennyson, and instruct you which is the better man, but he will draw his conclusions from their "tips" rather than from their poetry. He will agree with you that Lord Palmerston is a distinguished individual; but while you are thinking of the Premier's statesmanship, he is thinking of the Premier's jauntiness on the morning he had the honour of driving him. John's ideas of public men, although arrived at after a curious fashion, are pretty generally correct. Every one who tarries at St Catherine's should get himself driven across to Loch Goil by John Campbell, and should take pains to procure a seat on the box beside him. When he returns to the south, he can relate over again the stories he hears, and make himself the hero of them. The thing has been done before, and will be again.

[Sidenote: Inverary.]

A small wash-tub of a steamer carries you across Loch Fyne to Inverary in an hour. Arriving, you find the capital of the West Highlands a rather pretty place, with excellent inns, several churches, a fine bay, a ducal residence, a striking conical hill--Duniquoich the barbarous name of it--wooded to the chin, and with an ancient watch-tower perched on its bald crown. The chief seat of the Argyles cannot boast of much architectural beauty, being a square building with pepper-box-looking towers stuck on the corners. The grounds are charming, containing fine timber, winding walks, stately avenues, gardens, and through all, spanned by several bridges, the Airy bubbles sweetly to the sea. Scott is here. If the "Lady of the Lake" rings in your ears at the Trosachs, the "Legend of Montrose" haunts you at Inverary. Every footstep of ground is hallowed by that noble romance. It is the best guide-book to the place. No tourist should leave Inverary before he ascends Duniquoich--no very difficult task either, for a path winds round and round it. When you emerge from the woods beside the watch-tower on the summit, Inverary, far beneath, has dwindled to a toy town--not a sound is in the streets; unheard the steamer roaring at the wharf, and urging dilatory passengers to haste by the clashes of an angry bell. Along the shore nets stretched from pole to pole wave in the drying wind. The great boatless blue loch stretches away flat as a ballroom floor; and the eye wearies in its flight over endless miles of brown moor and mountain. Turn your back on the town, and gaze towards the north! It is still "a far cry to Loch Awe," and a wilderness of mountain peaks tower up between you and that noblest of Scottish lakes!--of all colours too--green with pasture, brown with moorland, touched with the coming purple of the heather, black with a thunder-cloud of pines. What a region to watch the sun go down upon! But for that you cannot wait; for to-day you lunch at Cladich, dine at Dalmally, and sleep in the neighbourhood of Kilchurn--in the immediate presence of Ben Cruachan.

[Sidenote: Kilchurn Castle.]

A noble vision of mountains is to be obtained from the road above Cladich. Dalmally is a very paradise of a Highland inn,--quiet, sequestered, begirt with the majesty and the silence of mountains,--a place where a world-weary man may soothe back into healthful motion jarred pulse and brain; a delicious nest for a happy pair to waste the honeymoon in. Dalmally stands on the shores of Loch Awe, and in the immediate vicinity of Kilchurn Castle and Ben Cruachan. The castle is picturesque enough to please the eye of the landscape-painter, and large enough to impress the visitor with a sense of baronial grandeur. And it is ancient enough, and fortunate enough too--for to that age does not always attain--to have legends growing upon its walls like the golden lichens or the darksome ivies. The vast shell of a building looks strangely impressive standing there, mirrored in summer waters, with the great mountain looking down on it. It was built, it is said, by a lady in the Crusade times, when her lord was battling with the infidel. The most prosaic man gazing on a ruin becomes a poet for the time being. You incontinently sit down, and think how, in the old pile, life went on for generations--how children were born and grew up there--how brides were brought home there, the bridal blushes yet on their cheeks--how old men died there, and had by filial fingers their eyes closed, as blinds are drawn down on the windows of an empty house, and the withered hands crossed decently upon the breasts that will heave no more with any passion. The yule fires, and the feast fires that blazed on the old hearths have gone out now. The arrow of the foeman seeks no longer the window slit. To day and night, to winter and summer, Kilchurn stands empty as a skull; yet with no harshness about it; possessed rather of a composed and decent beauty--reminding you of a good man's grave, with the number of his ripe years, and the catalogue of his virtues chiselled on the stone above him: telling of work faithfully done, and of the rest that follows, for which all the weary pine.

[Sidenote: Loch Awe.]

Ben Cruachan, if not the monarch of Scottish mountains, is, at all events, one of the princes of the blood. He is privileged to wear a snow-wreath in presence of the sun at his midsummer levee, and like a prince he wears it on the rough breast of him. Ben Cruachan is seen from afar: is difficult to climb, and slopes slowly down to the sea level, his base being twenty miles in girth, it is said. From Ben Cruachan and Kilchurn, Loch Awe, bedropt with wooded islands, stretches Obanwards, presenting in its course every variety of scenery. Now the loch spreads like a sea, now it shrinks to a rapid river--now the banks are wooded like the Trosachs, now they are bare as the "Screes" at Wastwater; and consider as you walk along what freaks light and shade are playing every moment--how shadows, hundred-armed, creep along the mountain-side--how the wet rock sparkles like a diamond, and then goes out--how the sunbeam slides along a belt of pines--and how, a slave to the sun, the lake quivers in light around her islands when he is unobscured, and wears his sable colours when a cloud is on his face. On your way to Oban there are many places worth seeing: Loch Etive, with its immemorial pines, beloved by Professor Wilson; Bunawe, Taynult, Connel Ferry, with its sea view and salt-water cataract; and Dunstaffnage Castle, once a royal residence, and from which the stone was taken which is placed beneath the coronation chair at Westminster. And so, if the whole journey from Inverary is performed on foot, Luna will light the traveller into Oban.

_OBAN._

[Sidenote: Oban.]

Oban, which, during winter, is a town of deserted hotels, begins to get busy by the end of June. Yachts skim about in the little bay; steamers, deep-sea and coasting, are continually arriving and departing; vehicles rattle about in the one broad, and the many narrow streets; and in the inns, boots, chamber-maid, and waiter are distracted with the clangour of innumerable bells. Out of doors, Oban is not a bad representation of Vanity Fair. Every variety of pleasure-seeker is to be found there, and every variety of costume. Reading parties from Oxford lounge about, smoke, stare into the small shop windows, and consult "Black's Guide." Beauty, in light attire, perambulates the principal street, and taciturn Valour in mufti accompanies her. Sportsmen in knickerbockers stand in groups at the hotel doors; Frenchmen chatter and shrug their shoulders; stolid Germans smoke curiously-curved meerschaum pipes; and individuals who have not a drop of Highland blood in their veins flutter about in the garb of the Gael, "a hundredweight of cairngorms throwing a prismatic glory around their persons." All kinds of people, and all kinds of sounds are there. From the next street the tones of the bagpipe come on the ear; tipsy porters abuse each other in Gaelic. Round the corner the mail comes rattling from Fort William, the passengers clustering on its roof; from the pier the bell of the departing steamer urges passengers to make haste; and passengers who have lost their luggage rush about, shout, gesticulate, and not unfrequently come into fierce personal collision with one of the tipsy porters aforesaid. A more hurried, nervous, frenzied place than Oban, during the summer and autumn months, it is difficult to conceive. People seldom stay there above a night. The old familiar faces are the resident population. The tourist no more thinks of spending a week in Oban than he thinks of spending a week in a railway station. When he arrives his first question is after a bedroom; his second, as to the hour at which the steamer from the south is expected.

And the steamer, be it said, does not always arrive at a reasonable hour. She may be detained some time at Greenock; in dirty weather she may be "on" the Mull of Cantyre all night, buffeted by the big Atlantic there; so that he must be a bold man, or a man gifted with the second sight, who ventures anything but a vague guess as to the hour of her arrival at Oban. And the weather _is_ dirty; the panes are blurred with raindrops; outside one beholds an uncomfortable sodden world, a spongy sky above, and midway, a gull sliding sideways through the murky atmosphere. The streets are as empty now as they will be some months hence. Beauty is in her own room crying over "Enoch Arden," and Valour, taciturn as ever, is in the smoking saloon. The Oxford reading party--which, under the circumstances, has not the slightest interest in Plato--attempts, with no great success, to kill the time by playing at pitch-and-toss. The gentlemen in the Highland dress remain indoors--birds with fine feathers do not wish to have them draggled--and the philabeg and an umbrella would be a combination quite too ridiculous. The tipsy porter is for the time silent; but from the next street the bagpipe grows in volume and torture. How the sound of it pains the nervous ear of a man half-maddened by a non-arriving steamer and a rainy day at Oban! Heavily the hours creep on; and at last the _Clansman_ does steam in with wet decks--thoroughly washed by Atlantic brine last night--and her hundred and fifty passengers, two-thirds of whom are sea-sick.