The famous Castle still stands by the river-side, in its modern form serving as a court-house and prison for ungracious Duncans made both drunk and bold; while the grounds of its “pleasant seat” are a lounge for honest inhabitants, kept in memory, by a statue of Flora Macdonald, how Prince Charles Edward’s men blew up the old blood-stained walls. Opposite, across the river, is the modern Cathedral of the Episcopal Church, here a considerable body which once had a soul of Jacobite sentiment. Inverness shows several fragments of antiquity, most revered of them that palladium Clach-na-Cudain--“stone of the tubs,” now built into the base of the restored Town Cross. A little way up the river its “Islands” have been adapted as a unique “combination of public park and natural wilderness, of clear brown swirls and eddies under the overhanging hazels and alders, and open and foaming white cataracts where artificial barriers divert the broad rush of the river.” This beauty-spot of wood and water no stranger should fail to seek out; then not far beyond he may gain Tom-na-hurich, “hill of the fairies,” which makes a picturesque cemetery, commanding what a pre-Wordsworthian writer describes as “a boundless view of gentlemen’s seats, seated generally under the shelter of eminences, and surrounded by wooded plantations.” Another fine prospect can be had a mile or so behind the station from the heights called “Hut of Health,” on which have been built extensive barracks. The hotels of Inverness are not too many to accommodate the crowds that flit through it in the tourist and shooting season. It has two annual galas, when accommodation may be hardest to find for love or money. The first is the “Character Fair” in July, so called because then some half a million changes hands over dealings in wool on the security of the dealer’s character, not a fleece being brought to market, nor even a sample, unless of human brawn and beards well displayed in the brightest of tartan and the roughest of homespun. The second is the Northern Meeting in September, gayest and smartest of those gatherings by which the old Highland games, dress, and music are kept up. But ah! this touch of local colour is too like the artificial bloom on a faded cheek. The glow of tartans here revived by what a German might call “Sunday Highlanders,” is but a Vanity Fair. The stalwart athletes, some of them “professionals,” who exert themselves to make a London holiday, have little more of Arcadian simplicity than the fine folk who look on. The clansmen forget old feuds; the chiefs no longer command the old loyalty; the greyness and greed of our practical world are settling down over the Highlands, conquered by gold, as hardly by southron steel.