I laugh.
So does the Glasgow merchant.
Then we shake hands and part.
Chapter Twenty Three.
Snow-Posts—A Moonlight Ramble—Dalwhinnie—A Danger Escaped—An Ugly Ascent—Inverness at Last.
“The rugged mountain’s scanty cloak
Was dwarfish shrubs of birch and oak,
And patches bright of bracken green,
And heather red that waved so high,
It held the copse in rivalry;
But where the lake slept deep and still,
Dank osiers fringed the swamp and hill.”
Scott.
“Now wound the path its dizzy ledge
Around a precipice’s edge.”
Idem.
Farther and farther on we walk or trot, and wilder and still more wild grows the scenery around us.
Not a tree of any kind is now visible, nor hedge nor fence bounds the narrow road; we are still close to the Garry. Beyond it are heath-clad banks, rising up into a braeland, a hill, or mountain, while the river is far down at the bottom of a cutting, which its own waters have worn in their rush of ages.