appear not, commercial anxieties are unknown. In their places are donkey rides, the waving of light summer dresses, merry pic-nics, and boating parties at sunset on the splendid sea. Here are the "comforts of the Sautmarket" in the midst of legendary hills. When the tempest is brewing up among the mountains, and night comes down a deluge of wind and rain; when the sea-bird is driven athwart the gloom like a flake of foam severed from the wave, and the crimson eye of the Clock glares at intervals across the frith, you can draw the curtains, stir the fire, and beguile the hours with the smiling wisdom of Thackeray, if a bachelor; if a family man, "The Battle of Prague," or the overture to "Don Giovanni," zealously thumped by filial hands, will drown the storm without. Hugging the left shore, we have Largs before us, where long ago Haco and his berserkers found dishonourable graves. On the other side is Bute, fairest, most melancholy of all the islands of the Clyde. From its sheltered position it has an atmosphere soft as that of Italy, and is one huge hospital now. You turn out in the dog-days, your head surmounted with a straw-hat ample enough to throw a shadow round you, your nether man encased in linen ducks, and see invalids sitting everywhere in the sunniest spots like autumn flies, or wandering feebly about, wrapt in greatcoats, their chalk faces shawled to the nose. You are half-broiled, they shiver as if in an icy wind. Their bent figures take the splendour out of the sea and the glory out of the sunshine. They fill the summer air as with the earthy horror of a new-made grave. You feel that they hang on life feebly, and will drop with the yellow leaf. Beyond Bute are the Cumbraes, twin sisters born in one fiery hour; and afar Arran, with his precipices, purple-frowning on the level sea. [Sidenote: Arran] In his preface to the "Rambles" Mr Macdonald writes:-- "The district of which Glasgow is the centre, while it possesses many scenes of richest Lowland beauty, and presents many glimpses of the stern and wild in Highland landscape, is peculiarly fertile in reminiscences of a historical nature. In the latter respect, indeed, it is excelled by few localities in Scotland--a circumstance of which many of our citizens seem to have been hitherto almost unconscious. There is a story told of a gentleman who, having boasted that he had travelled far to see a celebrated landscape on the Continent, was put to the blush by being compelled to own that he had never visited a scene of superior loveliness than one situated on his own estate, and near which he had spent the greater part of his life. The error of this individual is one of which too many are guilty." [Sidenote: Celebrated scenery disappointing.]