“Is that a’? Ye’ll find it ayont, then!” and pointing to a bag in the corner, she stood while I subtracted the largest, and then followed me to the general kitchen and receiving-room, where I buried my improvista dinner in the remains of the peat fire, and congratulated myself on my ready apology.
What to do while the potato was roasting! My English friend had already cleaned his gun for amusement, and I had looked on. We had stoned the pony till he had got beyond us in the morass, (small thanks to us, if the dame knew it.) We had tried to make a chicken swim ashore from the boat, we had fired away all my friend’s percussion caps, and there was nothing for it but to converse à rigueur. We lay on our backs till the dame brought us the hot potato on a shovel, with oat-cake and butter, and, with this Highland dinner, the last hour came decently to its death.
An Englishman, with his wife and lady’s maid, came over the hills with a boat’s crew; and a lassie, who was not very pretty, but who lived on the lake and had found the means to get “Captain Rob” and his men pretty well under her thumb. We were all embarked, the lassie in the stern-sheets with the captain; and ourselves, though we “paid the Scot,” of no more consideration than our portmanteaus. I was amused, for it was the first instance I had seen in any country (my own not excepted) of thorough emancipation from the distinction of superiors. Luckily the girl was bent on showing the captain to advantage, and by ingenious prompting and catechism she induced him to do what probably was his custom when he could not better amuse himself—point out the localities as the boat sped on, and quote the Lady of the Lake with an accent which made it a piece of good fortune to have “crammed” the poem before hand.
The shores of the lake are flat and uninteresting at the head, but, toward the scene of Scott’s romance, they rise into bold precipices, and gradually become worthy of their celebrity. The Trosachs are a cluster of small, green mountains, strewn, or rather piled, with shrubs and mossy verdure, and from a distance you would think only a bird, or Ranald of the Mist, could penetrate their labyrinthine recesses. Captain Rob showed us successively the Braes of Balquidder, Rob Roy’s birth and burial place, Benledi, and the crag from which hung, by the well woven skirts of braidcloth, the worthy baillie of Glasgow; and, beneath a precipice of remarkable wildness, the half intoxicated steersman raised his arm, and began to repeat, in the most unmitigated gutterals:—
“High o’er the south huge Benvenue
Down to the lake his masses threw,
Crags, knowls, and mounds confusedly hurl’d
The fragments of an earlier wurruld!” etc.
I have underlined it according to the captain’s judicious emphasis, and in the last word have endeavored to spell after his remarkable pronunciation. Probably to a Frenchman, however, it would have seemed all very fine—for Captain Rob (I must do him justice, though he broke the strap of my portmanteau) was as good-looking a ruffian as you would sketch on a summer’s tour.
Some of the loveliest water I have ever seen in my life (and I am rather an amateur of that element—to look at,) lies deep down at the bases of these divine Trosachs. The usual approaches from lake to mountain (beach or sloping shore,) are here dispensed with; and, straight up from the deep water, rise the green precipices and bold and ragged rocks, over-shadowing the glassy mirror below with teints like a cool corner in a landscape of Ruysdael’s. It is something—(indeed on a second thought, exceedingly) like—Lake George; only that the islands in this extremity of Loch Katrine lie closer together, and permit the sun no entrance except by a ray almost perpendicular. A painter will easily understand the effect of this—the loss of all that makes a surface to the water, and the consequent far depth to the eye, as if the boat in which you shot over it brought with it its own water and sent its ripple through the transparent air. I write currente calamo, and have no time to clear up my meaning, but it will be evident to all lovers of nature.