ilgrims pass in the round trip of a single day through the famous Trossachs District, di

ke gian

el enchan

e memorials of Protestant martyrs, the proud monuments of Bruce and Wallace, the ruins of Cambuskenneth Abbey, with its royal sepulchre, all show this region the heart of medi?val Scottish history. While Edinburgh grew to be recognised as the capital, Stirling Castle was the birthplace and the favourite residence of several among the James Stuarts that came to such an uneasy crown in boyhood; sometimes it was their prison or their school of sanguinary politics, when possession of the royal person counted as ace in the game played by truculently treacherous nobles. It has the distinction of being the last British castle to stand a siege, raised in 1746 by the Duke of Cumberland,

the north have found a master in Edward III.? Would the Plantagenets, with Scotland to back them, have made good their conq

TLE FROM THE

es with England, naturally we make much of the points won in a doubtful game. When I was at school there came among us perfervid young Scots an English boy, before whom, we agreed, it would be courteous and kind not to mention Bannockburn. Yet in the end some itching tongue let slip this moving name, but without ruffling our new comrade's pride. It turned out that he complacently took Bannockburn to have been an English victory; at all events, one more or less made no great matter to his thinking. Englishmen take their own national trophies so much for granted, that they are apt to forget the susceptibilities of other peoples. Such a one

trathclyde, and dim Picts of the east, each such a wild race as "slew the slayer and shall himself be slain," among whom intrude Roman legions and Norse pirates, the former falling back from their thistly conquest, the latter settling themselves firmly on the coasts. Out of this welter, as out of the Heptarchy in

melodrama of confused alarms and excursions, where the ill-drilled Celtic supernumeraries at the back of the stage often fall to fighting like wild cats among themselv

F LOCH KATRIN

re Wallace and Bruce; and the loudest applause hail

ot yet fully consecrated by misfortune. Over the stage passes that woeful procession of boy kings, most of them cut off before they had learned to rule, each leaving his son to be in turn kidnapped and tutored by fierce nobles to whom John Knox might well have preached on the text "Woe to thee, O land, when

his hand in; and if no strife be stirring at home, he hires himself out as a professional fighter or football player over foreign countries and counties, for pelf indeed, but also for the zest of the game. And now that Scotland has no longer its wonted national exercise of defending itself against England, it d

s learn how after all they are not hero and villain, but long-lost brothers, the one rich and proud but generous, the other poor and honest. Already, before the world's footlights, we see them fallen into each other'

onsideration. In this enlightened age when, as a great Scotsman says, "the Torch of Science has now been brandished and borne about with more or less effect for five thousand years and upwards," the truly philosophic mind should be capab

OF THE TROSSA

ensations must be everywhere recognised and allowed for, then at last we can take a calm and exact account of human nature in its different manifestations regarded by the light of impart

Prussian helmet-spike. Hitherto, alas! international characterisations have been coarse work, usually touched with a spice of malice. Every parish flatters itself by locating Gotham just over its bo

land of sobe

f intellect

are no such th

e enlightened

berty is Aus

ussia is as

hat statio

dition and th

he versati

n theatric

cotia are imp

rpose, prodi

Pa

est is too scandal

Disraeli-himself sprung from the Chosen People of the old Dispensation-Lord Salisbury was our only Premier not a Scotsman. Both the present Archbishops of the Anglican Church come from Presbyterian Scotland. The heads of other professions in England usually are or ought to be Scotsmen. The United States Constitution seems to require an amendment permitting the President to be a born Scot; but such names as Adams, Polk, Scott, Grant, McClellan, and McKinley have their significance in the history

AND BEN VEN

pear to have started the feud of Highlander and Lowlander. Father Adam is certainly understood to have worn the kilt. The Royal Scots claim to have furnished the guard over the Garden of Eden, in which case unpleasing questions are suggested as to the duties of the Black Watch at that epoch. The name of Eden was at one time held to fix the site of Paradise in the East Neuk o

ed that tall Wallace Monument whose interior makes a Walhalla of memorials to eminent Scotsmen like Carlyle and Gladstone. Bridge of Allan is a place of mills and bleach works, and of resort for its Spa of saline water, recommended, too, by its repute for a mild spring climate, rare in the north. The "Bridge," which we hav

the other hand I once came across an Anglican lady much shocked to find how "actually there was a Presbyterian service going on!" Carved screen, stalls, and communion table make ornaments seldom seen in the bareness of a nort

s from the Trossachs. This line at first follows the course of the Teith, "daughter of three mighty lakes," past Doune Castle, not Burns's "Bonnie Doon," but an imposing monument of feudal struggles a

LOCH ACHRAY

Cambusmore, where Scott spent the youthful holidays that made him familiar with the Trossachs country. Callander he does not mention, its name not fitting into his metre, whereas its neighbour Dunblane's amenity to rhyme brought to be planted there a flower of song at the hands of a writer who perhaps k

ndle bread was long an insult to any man of the execrated name. Sir John afterwards fought under Bruce; but however Scottish nobles might change sides in the game of feudal allegiance, the Commons were always true to patriotic resentment; and no services of that house have quite wiped out the memory of a traitor remembered as Gan among the peers of Charlemagne or Simon Girty on the

its battles between the Grahams and the Macgregors"; but now "over the Fingalian path, where once the red-shank trotted on his Highland garron, the bicyclist, the incarnation of the age, looks to a sign-post and sees This hill is dangerous." Its stony fields and lochans lying between hummocks are horizoned by grand mountains, among which Ben Lomond, t

ict of Menteith, by R.

der, when, early in the eighteenth cen

D, LOOKING UP GLEN

and, even later, we know how Bailie Nicol Jarvie thought twice before venturing into the haunts of that "honest" kinsman of his. As Ben Lomond dominates this landscape, so looms out the memory of Rob Roy Macgregor, that doughty o

he spoiler

e robber re

n for followers of the "good old rule, the simple plan" recorded by Wordsworth. The Forth made a boundary against these predatory excursions, yet sometimes a Roderick Dhu would harry fields and farms as far as the home of "poor Blanche of Devon," beyond Stirling. The "red soldiers" in turn came to pass the Highland line. On Ellen's Isle women and c

ght be made. Here, on the "Isle of Rest," shaded by giant chestnuts which tradition brings from Rome, are the ruins of a cloister whither

he Queen had

he'll have

ry Beaton an

Carmichae

ng ballad was a Mary Hamilton supposed by Scott to have been one of the Queen's attendants later on, but her identity is somewhat dubious; and one writer shows

did my mi

t she cr

hat I shoul

that I s

e a railway bra

, THE TROSSAC

ng with golf links and fishing at Loch Ard. As Ipswich shows the very room in the White Hart occupied by Mr. Pickwick and the green gate at which Sam Weller met Job Trotter, so among the lions here are the ploughshare valiantly handled by Bailie Nicol Jarvie, nay, even the identical bough from which he swung suspended by his coat tails. Such relics let one guess wh

y a peaceful stranger has passed this way since the Knight of Snowdoun's steed here "stretched his stiff limbs to rise no more"! What "cost thy life, my gallant grey" would be the fact that even in the poet's day, the path to Ellen's Isle was more like a ladde

rough the p

e's tide

Saxon's str

the mount

s chasm, so b

her roa

k caverns

wild whir

deep and da

battle's mi

r now upon

o ne'er shall

es of a torrent which suddenly whirls away his baggage and forces him to run for his life; by the gloomy grandeur of a pass where he finds a corpse which marauders have just stripped and mangled; or by the screams of those eagles whose next meal may probably be on his own eyes." But Dr. Hume Brown (Early Travel

H LOCHS ACHRAY AND V

h they duly admired in spite of the rain; and there they met a drawing-master from Edinburgh on the same picturesque-hunting errand. Dorothy Wordsworth's Journal tells us how the cottars were amused to hear of their secluded home being

Border, as witness his woeful travesty of the "Helen of Kirkconnel" story, and the philosophic considerations which he attributes to Rob Roy over what may have been that bold outlaw's grave. There is one verse in his "Highland Reaper" which seems a perfect epitome of the future Laureate's qualities, who, if he "uttered nothing base," could come too near

happy, far-

tles lo

advertiser. But let me hint to tourists who come duly furnished with the Lady of the Lake, that Black's Guide to the Trossachs includes an excellent commentary on the poem from what may seem an unpoetical source, the pen of an Astronomer-Royal, Sir G. B. Airey, whose topographical analysis will be found most instructive. These

ny braes of Maxwelton. This book has the serious purpose of giving a view of English school athletics, and pointing the moral that Frenchmen so trained would be all the

E, THE TROSSAC

ses. Nay more, he equips them with a pack of piebald pointers, well trained to retrieve in water, which he had come by in a remarkable manner: a certain Lord Stilton, breakfasting at the

do not judge it necessary to provide themselves with leave or license, but their hotel-keeper for two or three shillings hires a bare-legged shepherd in "a short petticoat" to show them where the game lies. In spite of this liberality, towards the end of the day the bag amounts only to three or four head, including one hare, explained to be a rara avis hereabouts, and one fierce bull which has given a spice of danger to their sport. In the evening, however, the grouse begin to "rise," spring up "every instant under their feet," and nearly two dozen are brought down, enough to serve for supper. The question of lodging presents more difficulty, the Trossachs being an "absolutely desert" country

ave to be rescued by a search party led by those sagacious pointers in true Ben St. Bernard style. In such cases, our author points out "the superiority of the savage over the civilised man, at least in the desert." Only

LOCH LOMOND,

saved to "dance a Scottish gi

der tents "vast as cathedrals," with splendid hospitality open to all comers, fountains flowing with beer, speeches, music, dancing, and fireworks. As bouquet of the festivities, he invites the strangers to a review of his stags, driven together "in full trot" till their gigantic antlers "gave the illusion of the marching forest in the Macbeth legend." The drive past lasts more than an hour, in the course of which are enumera

tourists are wont to take steamboat as far as Stronachlachar, and there cross by coach to the "bonny, bonny banks of Loch Lomond." They whose "free course" moves not by "such fixed cause," might well hold on to the head of Loch Katrine, crossing to Loch Lomond over the wild heights of Glengyle; or they would not find it amiss to turn back to Aberfoyle, thence past Loch Ard and the Falls of Ledard, following the track round Ben Lomond on which Rob Roy led Osbaldistone and the Bailie out of his cou

pleasing, resembling Thirlmere below Armboth." But no critic can carp at the fame of Loch Lomond as the most beautiful lake in Scotland; and one author who, as a native of the Lennox,

AND, LOCH KATR

ingdom, past memorials of Stuarts and Buchanans, Colquhouns and wild Macfarlanes. On the other side are caves associated with the adventures of Rob Roy, and spots sung by Wordsworth. And all this wonderland is overshadowed by Ben Lomond, its ascent easily made on foot or pony-back by a traveller not bound to do this whole round in one day. But let him beware of getting lost in the mist and having to spend all night on

ld Scotland, its name Dunbritton recording the older days when it was the stronghold of a Cumbrian kingdom. Here the literary genius loci is that not very ethereal shade Tobias Smollett, who, born on the banks of

from thy p

maze thy

birch, and gr

flower'd wi

y banks, so

herds and f

chanting o'

ds piping i

faith that k

y embrown'd

solved, and h

gs they enj

AND BEN VENU