The Highland Line is an oblique one, in the main facing south-east; and in much the same direction, between the head of deep inlets, extends the cleft of some threescore miles that cuts the Highlands into near and off halves, the former far the harder worked as a tourist ground, the latter retaining more of its Celtic poverty, while not less richly endowed by nature. From either side smaller glens and straths, each the “country” of some clan, debouch into Glenmore, bed of a chain of lochs and streams linked together as the Caledonian Canal, their varying levels made navigable by the locks that come easier to a Sassenach tongue. This canal is now nearly a century old. In the century before its trenches were opened, King George’s soldiers had islanded the farther Highlands by a road between three fortified posts, in the centre and at either end of this Great Glen, thus used as a base for dominating and civilising a region over which the fiery cross ran more freely than the king’s writ. The northernmost of the three, Fort-George, above Inverness, is still a military station, serving as depot for the Seaforth and Cameron Highlanders. Inverness is called the capital of the Highlands, though it lies on an edge of Celtic Scotland, at the north end of the Great Glen, and near the head of the Moray Firth. This is not a Gaelic city, whose inhabitants had at one time the fame of speaking the best English in Scotland, or, for the matter of that, in England, a merit sometimes traced back to a colony of Cromwell’s soldiers. Of late years, to tell the truth, the speech of Inverness has hardened and vulgarised somewhat in the mouths of a very mixed population; yet still in some of the secluded glens of the county may be heard a tongue not their own used with a melodious refinement unknown within the sound of Bow Bells. Smart, cheerful, and regularly built, Inverness has the air of a lowland town, spread out on a river plain, across which fragments of the Highlands have drifted from the grand mountains in view, as the Alps from Berne. The Ness has the distinction of being the shortest river in Britain, shorter even than London’s New River; but its course of only a few miles, from Loch Ness to the Moray Firth’s inner recess, is enough to make it a resort for big salmon and small shipping. Hector Boece records a former great “plenty and take of herring,” which vanished “for offence made against some Saint.” Sheltered from the winds of the east and the “weather” of the west, the district has a genial climate where, indeed, the air often “nimbly and sweetly recommends itself unto our gentle senses.” Shakespeare, not having the advantage of _Black’s Guide_, says little about the scenery around, which has been much described in _Wild Eelin_, William Black’s last and not his worst novel, though it has the deplorable fault of [Illustration: INVERNESS FROM NEAR THE ISLANDS] bringing in real personages not less thinly disguised than Inverness is as Invernish.