The heavy steps of the dame came over the threshold, and I began to doubt from the look in her eyes whether I should get a blow of her hairy arm or a “persuader” from the butt of a gun for my intrusion. “What are ye wantin’ here?” she speered at me, with a Helen-McGregor-to-Baillie-Nicol-Jarvie sort of an expression.
“I was looking for a potato to roast, my good woman.”
“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 a 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 oatcake 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 beforehand.
THE FORTH BRIDGE FROM THE NORTH
The shores of the lake are flat and uninteresting at the head, but towards 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 braid cloth, the worthy bailie of Glasgow; and, beneath a precipice of remarkable wildness, the half-intoxicated steersman raised his arm, and began to repeat, in the most unmitigated gutturals,—
“High o’er the south hung Benvenue,
Down to the lakes his masses threw,
Crags, knowls, and mounds confusedly hurl’d
The fragments of an earlier wurruld.”