When on the steamer we passed by Ellen’s Isle, we might have easily thrown a stone to drop in the place where lovely Ellen first looked upon the Knight of Snowdon. What painter could make the scene more lifelike than do the words of Scott? Another one of the scenes described in “The Lady of the Lake,” and pointed out by the cicerone, is the dread Goblin’s Cave. On the other side of the hill is “the pass of the cattle,” by which the kine taken in forays were conveyed within the protection of the Trossachs. In those days the defile was used by the Highlanders for other than strictly æsthetic purposes. When we realize how true it was of the Highlanders, as of the sons of Jacob, that their chief trade was in cattle, it is hardly to be wondered at that many of the American highlanders of East Tennessee, with their Caledonian ancestry, concerning the property of the cotton planters long held the view of Roderick Dhu. Nor is it strange that so many sturdy Scotch youth have been allured to our own Wild West to become cowboys! Yet, although it is the Highland black ox that figures so largely in both poetry and economics, it was the goat that furnished the consecrated blood in which the flames of the fiery cross were extinguished. This terrible war-gospel and signal with anathema for assembling the clans, with its ban of death upon all faint-hearted or recalcitrant, furnished the final test of loyalty to the chief. It bade the bridegroom leave his bride, the mourner his bier, the only son his widowed parent, the smith his forge, and the fisherman his nets--all to buckle on the sword. Scott, in a few lines of his “Lady of the Lake,” pictures its awful significance. No law-book or learned treatise can portray the old Highland life of the clan--when the one tie of society was loyalty to the chief and its symbol the sword--as do the writings of Sir Walter Scott. In old Japan, in which I lived, I saw before me a mirror of Celtic Scotland. Yet to-day, while one may “hear his own mountain-goats bleating aloft” and thousands of the capricious creatures are domesticated and available for milk and meat, there are thousands more that are as wild as if their species originated in heather land. Their keenness of vision and scent makes it nearly impossible for hunters to get within shot of them.