With the World's Great Travellers, Volume 3

by Unknown

Our host of Invarenden supplied us with another cart to take us down to Tarbot, and having dined with a waterfall looking in at each of our two opposite windows (the inn stands in a valley between two mountains), we were committed to the care of his eldest boy, and jolted off for the head of Loch Lomond.

I have never happened to see a traveller who had seen Loch Lomond in perfectly good weather. My companion had been there every summer for several years, and believes it always rained under Ben Lomond. As we came in sight of the lake, however, the water looked like one sheet of gold leaf, trembling, as if by the motion of fish below, but unruffled by wind; and if paradise were made so fair, and had such waters in its midst, I could better conceive than before the unhappiness of Adam when driven forth. The sun was just setting, and the road descended immediately to the shore, and kept along under precipitous rocks, and slopes of alternate cultivation and heather, to the place of our destination. And a lovely place it is! Send me to Tarbot when I would retreat from the world. It is an inn buried in a grove at the foot of hills, and set in a bend of the lake-shore, like a diamond upon an “orbed brow;” and the light in its kitchen, as we approached in the twilight, was as interesting as a ray of the “first water” from the same. We had now reached the route of the cockney tourists, and while we perceived it agreeably in the excellence of the hotel, we perceived it disagreeably in the price of the wines, and the presence of what my friend called “unmitigated vulgarisms” in the coffee-room. That is the worst of England. The people are vulgar, but not vulgar enough. One dances with the lazzaroni at Naples, when he would scarce think of handing the newspaper to the “person” on a tour at Tarbot. Condescension is the only agreeable virtue, I have made up my mind.

Well—it was moonlight. The wind was south and affectionate, and the road in front of the hotel “fleck’d with silver,” and my friend’s wife, and the corresponding object of interest to myself, being on the other side of Ben Lomond and the Tweed, we had nothing for it after supper but to walk up and down with one another, and talk of the past. In the course of our ramble we walked through an open gate, and, ascending a gravel walk, found a beautiful cottage, built between two mountain streams, and ornamented with every device of taste and contrivance. The mild pure torrents were led over falls and brought to the threshold of bowers, and seats, and bridges, and winding paths were distributed up the steep channels in a way that might make it a haunt for Titania. It is the property, we found afterwards, of a Scotch gentleman, and a great summer retreat of the celebrated Jeffrey, his friend. It was one more place to which my heart clung in parting.

Loch Lomond sat still for its picture in the morning, and after an early breakfast we took a row-boat, with a couple of Highlanders, for Inversnade, and pulled across the lake with a kind of drowsy delightfulness in the scene and air which I had never before found out of Italy. We overshot our destination a little to look into Rob Roy’s cave, a dark den in the face of the rock, which has the look of his vocation; and then pulling back along the shore, we were landed, in the spray of a waterfall, at a cottage occupied by the boatman of this Highland ferry. From this point across to Loch Katrine is some five miles, and the scene of Scott’s novel of Rob Roy. It has been “done” so often by tourists that I leave all particular description of the localities and the scenery to the well-hammered remembrance of readers of magazines, and confine myself to my own private adventures.

The distance between the lakes is usually performed by ladies on donkeys, and by gentlemen on foot, but being myself rather tender-toed with the gout, my companion started off alone, and I lay down on the grass at Inversnade to wait the return of the long-eared troop, who were gone across with an earlier party. The waterfall and the cottage just above the edge of the lake, a sharp hill behind, closely wooded with beech and fir, and, on a greensward platform in the rear of the house, two Highland lassies, and a laddie, treading down a stack of new hay, were not bad circumstances in which to be left alone with the witcheries of the great enchanter.

I must narrate here an adventure in which my own part was rather a discomfiture, but which will show somewhat the manners of the people. My companion had been gone half an hour, and I was lying at the foot of a tree, listening to the waterfall and looking off on the lake, and watching by fits the lad and lassies I have spoken of, who were building a haystack between them, and chattering away most unceasingly in Gaelic. The eldest of the girls was a tall, ill-favored damsel, merry as an Oread, but as ugly as Donald Bean; and after a while I began to suspect, by the looks of the boy below, that I had furnished her with a new theme. She addressed some remark to me presently, and a skirmish of banter ensued, which ended in a challenge to me to climb upon the stack. It was about ten feet high, and shelving outward from the bottom, and my Armida had drawn up the ladder. The stack was built, however, under a high tree, and I was soon up the trunk, and, swinging off from a low branch, dropped in the middle of the stack.

In the same instant I was raised in a grasp to which I could offer no resistance, and, with a fling to which I should have believed the strength of few men equal, thrown clear of the stack to the ground. I alighted on my back, with a fall of perhaps twelve feet, and felt seriously hurt. The next moment, however, my gentle friend had me in her arms (I am six feet high in my stockings), and I was carried into the cottage, and laid on a flock bed, before I could well decide whether my back was broken or no. Whiskey was applied externally and internally, and the old crone, who was the only inhabitant of the hovel, commenced a lecture in Gaelic, as I stood once more sound upon my legs, which seemed to take effect upon the penitent, though her victim was no wiser for it. I took the opportunity to look at the frame which had proved itself of such vigorous power, but, except arms of extraordinary length, she was like any other equally ugly, middle-sized woman. In the remaining half-hour before the donkeys arrived we became the best of friends, and she set me off for Loch Katrine with a caution to the ass-driver to take care of me, which that sandy-haired Highlander took as an excellent joke, and no wonder!

The long mountain glen between these two lakes was the home of Rob Roy, and the Highlanders point out various localities, all commemorated in Scott’s incomparable story. The house where Helen McGregor was born lies a stone’s throw off the road to the left, and Rob Roy’s gun is shown by an old woman who lives near by. He must have been rich in arms by the same token, for, besides the well-authenticated one at Abbotsford, I have seen some dozen guns and twice as many daggers and shot-pouches which lay claim to the same honor. I paid my shilling to the old woman not the less. She owed it to the pleasure I had received from Sir Walter’s novel.

The view of Loch Lomond back from the highest point of the pass is incomparably fine; at least when I saw it, for sunshine and temperature and the effect of the light vapors on the hills were at their loveliest and most favorable. It looks more like the haunt of a robber and his caterans, probably, in its more common garb of Scotch mist, but, to my eye, it was a scene of the most Arcadian peace and serenity. I dawdled along the five miles upon my donkey, with something of an ache in my back, but a very healthful and sunny freedom from pain and impatience at my heart. And so did not Baillie Nicol Jarvie make the same memorable journey.

The cottage inn at the head of Loch Katrine was tenanted by a woman, who might have been a horse-guardsman in petticoats, and who kept her smiles for other cattle than the Sassenach. We bought her whiskey and milk, praised her butter, and were civil to the little Highlandman at her breast; but neither mother nor child were to be mollified. The rocks were bare around, we were too tired for a pull in the boat, and three mortal hours lay between us and the nearest event in our history. I first penetrated, in the absence of our Hecate, to the inner room of the sheiling. On the wall hung a broadsword, two guns, a trophy or two of deer’s horns, and a Sunday suit of plaid, philibeg and short red coat, surmounted by a gallant bonnet and feather. Four cribs, like the berths in a ship, occupied the farther side of the chamber, each large enough to contain two persons; a snow-white table stood between the windows; a sixpenny glass, with an eagle’s feather stuck in the frame, hung at such a height that, “though tall of my hands,” I could just see my nose; and just under the ceiling on the left was a broad and capacious shelf, on which reposed apparently the old clothes of a century,—a sort of place where the gude-wife would have hidden Prince Charlie, or might rummage for her grandmother’s baby linen.