and maid brought them patriotic offerings of dry hose, with which at least to “change their feet.”
Now let us turn to the tourist, who has neither lust nor license to ruffle the least feather of grouse or gull, but calls forth angry passions when his red guide-book or her sunshade come scaring the prey stalked by lords of Cockaigne and Porkopolis. He and she, by coveys, swarm in various directions from Inverness, but chiefly by the Caledonian Canal, that highroad of pleasure, as once of business, between the North and the South Highlands. Had we seen this road “before it was made,” we should find little difference to-day, unless for a few more modern mansions that have swallowed up many a lowly home, still, perhaps, marked by patches of green about the ruined mountain shielings where, as on Alpine pastures, Highland Sennerin made butter and cheese through the long summer days. A steamboat carries one right through the Great Glen, beneath mountain giants, clad in nature’s own tartan of green and purple chequered by brown and grey, with bare knees of crag, and streaming sporrans of cascade, and feathers of fir-wood, too often wrapped in a plaid of mist, or hidden by a mackintosh of drenching rain. Else, against the clear sky-line, one may catch sight of a noble stag on the hill head, displayed like its crest, sniffing motionless at the steamer far below, unconscious of an unseen enemy stealing up the rearward corrie with heart athrob for his blood, which, at the pull of a trigger, may or may not stain the heath.
From its port below Craig Phadric, believed to have been the stronghold of a king older than Duncan, then past the hill bearing his name, the Canal soon takes us through the fertile strath into the wilder Highlands. The first stage of that grand panorama is through deep Loch Ness, where on one side Mealfourvonie towers like a hayrick, round which goes the way to those remote Falls of Glomach, called the noblest in Britain, and on the other are more easily reached the Falls of Foyers, chained and set to work by an Aluminium Company that did not tremble at the rhapsody of Christopher North:—
“Here is solitude with a vengeance—stern, grim, dungeon solitude! How ghostlike those white, skeleton pines, stripped of their rind by tempest and lightning, and dead to the din of the raging cauldron! That cataract, if descending on a cathedral, would shatter down the pile into a million of fragments. But it meets the black foundations of the cliff, and flies up to the starless heaven in a storm of spray. We are drenched, as if leaning in a hurricane over the gunwale of a ship, rolling under bare poles through a heavy sea. The very solid globe of earth quakes through her entrails. The eye, reconciled to the darkness, now sees a glimmering and gloomy light—and lo, a bridge of a single arch hung across the chasm, just high enough to let through the triumphant torrent. Has some hill-loch burst its barriers? For what a world of waters come now tumbling into the abyss! Niagara! hast thou a fiercer roar? Listen—and you think there are momentary pauses of the thunder, filled up with goblin groans! All the military music-bands of the army of Britain would here be dumb as mutes—Trumpet, Cymbal, and the Great Drum! There is a desperate temptation in the hubbub to leap into destruction. Water-horses and kelpies, keep stabled in your rock-stalls—for if you issue forth the river will sweep you down, before you have finished one neigh, to Castle Urquhart, and dash you, in a sheet of foam, to the top of her rocking battlements.... We emerge, like a gay creature of the element, from the chasm, and wing our way up the glen towards the source of the cataract. In a few miles all is silent. A more peaceful place is not among all the mountains. The water-spout that had fallen during night has found its way into Loch Ness, and the torrent has subsided into a burn. What the trouts did with themselves in the ‘red jawing speat’ we are not naturalist enough to affirm, but we must suppose they have galleries running far into the banks, and corridors cut in the rocks, where they swim about in water without a gurgle, safe as golden and silver fishes in a glass-globe, on the table of my lady’s boudoir. Not a fin on their backs has been injured—not a scale struck from their starry sides. There they leap in the sunshine among the burnished clouds of insects, that come floating along on the morning air from bush and bracken, the licheny cliff-stones, and the hollow-rinded woods.”
At the head of Loch Ness our boat takes to locks again at Fort-Augustus, now turned into a Catholic monastery, arms yielding to the gown. Hence, if the rain persistently blot out all prospect, we might hasten on by branch railway to the West Highland Line, passing near those geological lions called the “parallel roads” of Glenroy. Else we thread the water between the heights of Keppoch and Glengarry, marked by the cairns of many a forgotten feud, and through Loch Oich and Loch Lochy come to cross the West Highland Railway at Banavie, where the Canal descends to sea level by a staircase of locks like that at Trollhatta on the not less famous waterway from Gothenburg to Stockholm.
Loch Oich, the smallest of the chain into which the Garry comes down from its basin, has an authentic legend as retreat of Ewen Macphee, perhaps the last British outlaw above the rank of a lurking poacher or illicit distiller. Early in the nineteenth century he enlisted in a Highland regiment, from which he deserted, and though captured and handcuffed, made a romantic escape to his native wilds of Glengarry. After camping in the woods till the hue and cry after him had died out, he settled on an islet of Loch Oich, where he took to himself a wife and reared a sturdy brood. For long he played Rob Roy on a small scale, “lifting” sheep and helping himself to game, while he enjoyed the sanctity of a seer’s reputation. When a southern landlord bought the property, he established a not unfriendly modus vivendi with this tackless tenant, who introduced himself to the new owner by sticking his dirk into the table as title-deed to his island—“By this right I hold it!” But by and by the minions of the law pressed upon his retreat; and in spite of a resolute defence, in which his wife handled a gun like a modern Helen Macgregor, he was arrested for sheep stealing, and taken to prison, where he pined away after a long life of lawless freedom. Bales of sheep skins and tallow, found hidden about his fastness, were evidence of how he had lived at the expense of his neighbours, a feature too much left out of sight in modern regret for the picturesque old times.
Banavie—that seems to be a kilted cousin of Banff, and forebear of the Rocky Mountain paradise an American geographer presumes to spell Bamf—is close to Fort-William, the southernmost of the three military posts that bridled the Great Glen. In Stuart days this was Inverlochy, scene of that battle between Montrose and Argyle. It is now a town of snug hotels, over which rises the proclaimed monarch of British mountains, his gloomy brow often crowned with mist and his precipitous shoulders ermined with snow at any season. But if the weather favour, from the Observatory Tower at the top,