THE BRIG O' TURK.
It is a walk of perhaps eight miles through a charming memory-haunted land, lovely certainly, lonely; there were few people to be met with, but there was no sense of desertion. It was a day of quick clouds, rushing across a deep blue, compact white clouds which say nothing of rain, and very vivid air, the surfaces and the shadows being closely defined. The birch leaves played gleefully over the path as we left the highway, and that sweet shrewd scent of the birch leaf, as I "pu'd a birk" now and then, completed the thrill, the ecstasy—if one may be permitted the extravagance.
"But ere the Brig o' Turk was won
The headmost horseman rode alone,
Alone, but with unbated zeal—"
Here I should take up the thread of the old poem and weave it entire. But first because I had come adventuring, even like the Gudeman o' Ballengeich, and taking my chances as they came along, and meeting no Highland girl and no Fair Ellen, I did seek out lodgings in one of the cottages which cluster about the foot of Glen Finglas, typical Highland cottages. Not the kind, I regret and do not regret, which Dorothy Wordsworth describes with such triumph, where William and Dorothy and Coleridge put up—"we caroused our cups of coffee, laughing like children," over the adventure; but still a cottage, with a single bed room. These cottages, no doubt because artists now and then inhabit them and because all the world passes by and because they are on Montrose property, are what the artist and the poet mean by a cottage, low-browed, of field stone, and rose-entwined.
The hurried traveler with no time to spare and no comforts, lodges at the Trossachs hotel, which aspires to look like a Lady-of-the-Lake Abbotsford, and is, in truth, of an awesome splendour like some Del Monte or Ponce de Leon.
There is a parish church—I heard the bell far off in the woods—near the hotel, but standing mid
"the copsewood gray
That waved and wept on Loch Achray."
It waved gently, and wept not at all that peaceful Sunday morning when we made our way by path and strath into the dell of peace. The people coming from the countryside repossess their own, and of course the tourists are not in the church, or if there, with a subdued quality. The coaches do not run, and there fell a peace over all the too well known, too much trodden land, which restored it to the century in which it truly belongs.
