[Sidenote: Loch Achray--the Trosachs.] At a turn of the road Loch Achray is before you. Beyond expression beautiful is that smiling lake, mirroring the hills, whether bare and green or plumaged with woods from base to crest. Fair azure gem in a setting of mountains! the traveller--even if a bagman--cannot but pause to drink in its fairy beauty; cannot but remember it when far away amid other scenes and associations. At every step the scenery grows wilder. Loch Achray disappears. High in upper air tower the summits of Ben-Aan and Ben-Venue. You pass through the gorge of the Trosachs, whose rocky walls, born in earthquake and fiery deluge, the fanciful summer has been dressing these thousand years, clothing their feet with drooping ferns and rods of foxglove bells, blackening their breasts with pines, feathering their pinnacles with airy birches, that dance in the breeze like plumage on a warrior's helm. The wind here becomes a musician. Echo sits babbling beneath the rock. The gorge, too, is but the prelude to a finer charm; for before you are aware, doubling her beauty with surprise, there breaks on the right the silver sheet of Loch Katrine, with a dozen woody islands, sleeping peacefully on their shadows. [Sidenote: Inversneyd] On the loch, the steamer _Rob Roy_ awaits you, and away you pant and fume towards a wharf, and an inn, with an unpronounceable name, at the farther end. The lake does not increase in beauty as you proceed. All its charms are congregated at the mouth of the Trosachs, and the upper reaches are bare, desolate, and uninteresting. You soon reach the wharf, and after your natural rage at a toll of twopence exacted from you on landing has subsided, and you have had a snack of something at the inn, you start on the wild mountain road towards Inversneyd. The aspect of the country has now changed. The hills around are bare and sterile, brown streams gurgle down their fissures, the long yellow ribbon of road runs away before you, dipping out of sight sometimes, and reappearing afar. You pass a turf hut, and your nostrils are invaded by a waft of peat reek which sets you coughing, and brings the tears into your eyes; and the juvenile natives eye you askance, and wear the airiest form of the national attire. In truth, there is not a finer bit of Highland road to be found anywhere than that which runs between the inn--which, like the Russian heroes in "Don Juan," might be immortal if the name of it could be pronounced by human organs--and the hotel at Inversneyd. When you have travelled some three miles, the scenery improves, the hills rise into nobler forms with misty wreaths about them, and as you pursue your journey a torrent becomes your companion. Presently, a ruin rises on the hill-side, the nettles growing on its melancholy walls. It is the old fort of Inversneyd, built in King William's time to awe the turbulent clans. Nothing can be more desolate than its aspect. Sunshine seems to mock it; it is