On the second of these inland voyages we were on the steamer Gondolier. From Oban we cross Loch Linnhe, which forms the southern end of the great canal, and call at Ardgour. At the head of the loch we stop at Fort William, formerly called “the Key of the Highlands.” It is now a town consisting chiefly of a long, narrow street, full of hotels. The fort was originally erected in 1655 by Cromwell’s General Monk and called “Kilmallie.” Under the reign of King William, in 1690, General Hugh McKay enlarged the work and named it after the Dutch king, the town being called “Maryburgh,” in honor of the queen. It was to this place that the perpetrators of the massacre at Glencoe came to divide their spoil. In 1715 and again in 1746, the followers of “Bonnie Prince Charlie,” the Jacobites, besieged the place, but unsuccessfully. No remnants of the fort, which was dismantled in 1860, now remain, for in 1890 the ruins were wholly removed to provide room for the iron rails and railway station; for, since the hills come down close together, there is not much level real-estate room. It illustrates the sadness of things to find here great distilleries which are large enough to mar the landscape. The town produced a poet, and near the railway station is an obelisk to the memory of Ewen MacLachlin, who wrote verses in Gaelic. Four miles away is Ben Nevis, 4406 feet high, the loftiest mountain in the British Islands. Later, at Inverness, I met a Scottish artist who had painted the mountain from many points of view, but he seemed more impressed with its ugliness and shaggy character than with its beauty. In fact, in comparing the artistic work of this painter with that of Mr. Robert Allan, who transfers to canvas the ideal loveliness of the ocean,--both Scottish and both masterly,--we recalled that inimitable passage of Ruskin, contrasting the form and functions of the mountains and the sea, which furnishes so illuminating a commentary on the passage written by an ancient admirer of nature and its Creator,--“Thy righteousness is like the great mountains; thy judgments are a great deep.” We noted, in our summer travels, not a few men of the easel. A mile and a half from the town is the grand old ruin of Inverlochie, to which many landscape painters resort. Other places of interest are the site of the battlefield of 1645 and the castle of Lord Abinger, built in the Scottish baronial style.