I do not think that any two boys were ever more glad to find themselves back once more, safely under the parental roof-tree, than Duncan and Conal. They had made many friends in London, it is true, and spent many a happy evening therein, and these they could look back to with pleasure and with a sigh; but the city and town itself, with all its strange ways, the ignorance of its lower classes, its murdered twangy English, its filth and its festering iniquities--they positively shuddered when they thought of.
God seemed nowhere in London. Here in this wild and beautiful land He appeared to be everywhere.
The pure and virgin snow that clad the moors and mountains was a carpet on which angels might tread; the tiny budlets already appearing on the trees were scattered there by His own hand; yea, and the very wind that sighed and moaned through the forest was the breath of heaven.
And when the sun had gone down behind the waves of the western ocean did not
"The moon take up the wondrous tale
And nightly to the listening earth
Repeat the story of her birth,
While all the stars that round her burn,
And all the planets in their turn
Confirm the story as they roll,
And spread the truth from pole to pole".
Yes, in wild and silent lands, God seems very near. It was in a country like this that the immortal poet Lord Byron wrote much of his best poetry. And no bolder song did he ever pen than Loch-na-garr. Near here many of his ancestors--the Gordons--were laid to rest after the fatal field of Culloden. In one verse he says--
"Ill-starred, though brave, did no vision foreboding
Tell you that fate had forsaken your cause?
Ah! were ye then destined to die at Culloden,
Though victory crown'd not your fall with applause.
Still were ye happy in death's earthly slumbers,
You rest with your clan in the caves of Braemar,
The pibroch resounds to the piper's loud numbers
Your deeds to the echoes of wild Loch-na-garr."
No wonder that, wandering amidst such soul-enthralling scenery, arrayed in the tartan of his clan, or thinking of the happy days of his boyhood, years and years afterwards he said as he sighed--
"England, thy beauties are tame and domestic
To one who has roam'd on the mountains afar!
Oh! for the crags that are wild and majestic,
The steep frowning glories of dark Loch-na-garr."
But Frank Trelawney was a guest at Glenvoie, and, imbued with that spirit of hospitality for which Highlanders are so famous, the boys M'Vayne would have bitten their tongue through and through rather than say one disparaging word about England.