The sun was still well above the horizon when the concert ended, though the hour of nine had already sounded from the church spire.
Not far beyond the town the hills died away on the left and disclosed the unruffled surface of Loch Lomond, its western end aglow with the light of the drowning sun. By and by the moon rose to cast a phosphorescent shimmer over the Loch and its little wooded islands. On the next hillside stood a field of wheat shocks. I turned into it, giving the owner’s house a wide berth. The straw was fresh and clean, just the thing for a soft bed. But wheat sheaths do not offer substantial protection against the winds of the Scottish Highlands, and it was not with a sense of having slept soundly that I rose at daybreak and pushed on.
Two hours of tramping brought me to Luss, a cozy little village on the edge of the Loch. I hastened to the principal street in quest of a restaurant, but the hamlet was everywhere silent and asleep. Down on the beach of the Loch a lone fisherman, preparing his tackle for the day’s labor, took umbrage at my suggestion that his fellow-townsmen were late risers.
“Why mon, ’tis no late!” he protested, “’tis no more nor five, an’ a bonny mornin’ it is, too. But there’s a mist in it,” he added pessimistically.
I glanced at the bright morning sun and the unclouded sky and set down both statements for fiction. But a clock-maker’s window down the beach confirmed the first, and the second proved as true before the day was done. Stifling my premature hunger, I stretched out on the sands to await the morning steamer; for Ben Lomond, the ascent of which I had planned, stood just across the Loch.
About six a heavy-eyed shopkeeper sold me a roll of bologna, concocted of equal parts of pepper and meat, and a loaf of day-before-yesterday’s bread. The steamer whistle sounded before I had regained the beach. I purchased a ticket at the shore-end of the distorted wooden wharf and hurried out to board the craft. My way was blocked by a burly Scot who demanded “tu p’nce.”
“But I’ve paid my fare,” I protested, holding up the ticket.
“Aye, mon, ye hov,” rumbled the native, straddling his legs and setting his elbows akimbo. “Ye hov, mon. But ye hovna paid fer walkin’ oot t’ yon boat on oor wharf.”
Ten minutes later I paid a similar sum for the privilege of walking off the boat at Renwardenen.
Plodding across a half-mile of heath and morass, I struck into the narrow, white path that zigzagged up the face of the Ben, and soon overtook three Glasgow firemen, off for a day’s vacation in the hills. The mist that the fisherman had foreseen began to settle down and turned soon to a drenching rain. For five hours we scrambled silently upward in Indian file, slipping and falling on wet rocks and into deep bogs, to come at last to a broad, flat boulder where the path vanished. It was the summit of old Ben Lomond, a tiny island in a sea of whirling grey mist, into which the wind bowled us when we attempted to stand erect. My companions fell to cursing their luck in expressive Scotch. The remnants of a picnic lunch under the shelter of a cairn tantalized us with the thought of how different the scene would have been on a day of sunshine. I was reminded, too, of the bread and bologna that had been left over from my breakfast, and I thrust a hand hopefully into my pocket. My fingers plunged into a floating pulp of pepper, dough, and bits of meat and paper that it would have been an insult to offer to share with the hungriest mortal; and I fell to munching the mess alone.