improves, and a few miles on, the road skirts the Teith, the sweetest voiced of all the Scottish streams. The Roman centurion heard that pebbly murmur on his march even as you now hear it. The river, like all beautiful things, is coquettish, and just when you come to love her music, she sweeps away into the darkness of the woods and leaves you companionless on the dusty road. Never mind, you will meet her again at Callander, and there, for a whole summer day, you can lean on the bridge and listen to her singing. Callander is one of the prettiest of Highland villages. It was sunset as I approached it first, years ago. Beautiful the long crooked street of white-washed houses dressed in rosy colours. Prettily-dressed children were walking or running about. The empty coach was standing at the door of the hotel, and the smoking horses were being led up and down. And right in front stood King Benledi, clothed in imperial purple, the spokes of splendour from the sinking sun raying far away into heaven from behind his mighty shoulders. [Sidenote: Callander.] Callander sits like a watcher at the opening of the glens, and is a rendezvous of tourists. To the right is the Pass of Leny--well worthy of a visit. You ascend a steep path, birch-trees on right and left; the stream comes brawling down, sleeping for a moment in black pools beloved by anglers, and then hasting on in foam and fury to meet her sister in the Vale of Menteith below. When you have climbed the pass, you enter on a green treeless waste, and soon approach Loch Lubnaig, with the great shadow of a hill blackening across it. The loch is perhaps cheerful enough when the sun is shining on it, but the sun in that melancholy region is but seldom seen. Beside the road is an old churchyard, for which no one seems to care--the tombstones being submerged in a sea of rank grass. The loch of the rueful countenance will not be visited on the present occasion. My course lies round the left flank of Benledi, straight on for the Trosachs and Loch Katrine. Leaving Callander, you cross the waters of the Leny--changed now from the fury that, with raised voice and streaming tresses, leaped from rock to rock in the glen above--and walk into the country made immortal by the "Lady of the Lake." Every step you take is in the footsteps of Apollo: speech at once becomes song. There is Coilantogle Ford; Loch Venachar, yonder, is glittering away in windy sunshine to the bounding hills. Passing the lake you come on a spot where the hill-side drops suddenly down on the road. On this hill-side Vich Alpine's warriors started out of the ferns at the whistle of their chief; and if you travelled on the coach, the driver would repeat half the poem with curious variations, and point out the identical rock against which Fitz-James leaned--rock on which a dozen eyeglasses are at once levelled in wonder and admiration. The loveliest sight on the route to the Trosachs is about to present itself.