"It may be judged how far it was convenient in winter to hunt a forest separated by such a boundary, of which the nearest certain passage was by a bridge two miles to the west, with frequently the view of hunting three miles to the east. Often we have gone out in a clear sapphire morning, when there was scarce a ripple on the pools, and the water on the ford was not over our 'glunachan,' and when we returned at evening, and approached through the dark veil of pines which descended to the river, have heard a roar as if the world was rolling together down the black trough before us, and as we came out on the bank, found a furious tempest of water, tumbling, and plunging, and leaping, over stock and rock twenty feet upon the clatach, where we had left it whimpering among the pebbles in the morning; while, in the far, deep, birch-embowered channel, where the stream was then so still and placid that you could only guess its course by the bright glistening eye which here and there blinked between the trees and stones,--now it came yelling, and skirling, and clamouring down the rocks and falls, as if all the air was full of gibbering, babbling, laughing demons, who were muttering, and yammering, and prophesying, and hooting, at what you were going to do, if you attempted to cross." We pray you at your leisure to read on, and you will presently see what peril our authors underwent at the fearful fords of the Findhorn. Once or twice in our life we have been in similar jeopardy, and we can testify with unction to the singular sensations which beset a man in the midst of a roaring river, when the rapids are shooting away below, and the boulder-stones rolling beneath his feet. We pass over some perilous instances of adventure, which at length became so frequent as to lead to the construction of the hut. "Such continually and unexpectedly were the ferries of the Findhorn, and many such escapes we had, in daylight and in darkness.--Twice I have been swamped, often nearly upset, and more than once carried off my legs in the fords; and--I say it with humility, and always under the mercy of heaven--that I owed rescue either to actual swimming, or to the confidence inspired by that power when struggling with the strong and terrible enemy. "This continual exposure to battle and disappointment, however, became at length too vexatious an abridgment of sport and certainty; and as I would--and often--have made my bed under a fir tree rather than go round by the bridge of Daltullich, I resolved upon another alternative--to build in the forest a '_bothan an t-sealgair_,' or 'hunter's hut,' where we might lodge for the night when it was impossible to cross the water.