There they leap in the sunshine among the burnished clouds of insects, that come floating along on the morning air from bush and bracken, the licheny cliff-stones, and the hollow-rinded woods.” At the head of Loch Ness our boat takes to locks again at Fort-Augustus, now turned into a Catholic monastery, arms yielding to the gown. Hence, if the rain persistently blot out all prospect, we might hasten on by branch railway to the West Highland Line, passing near those geological lions called the “parallel roads” of Glenroy. Else we thread the water between the heights of Keppoch and Glengarry, marked by the cairns of many a forgotten feud, and through Loch Oich and Loch Lochy come to cross the West Highland Railway at Banavie, where the Canal descends to sea level by a staircase of locks like that at Trollhatta on the not less famous waterway from Gothenburg to Stockholm. Loch Oich, the smallest of the chain into which the Garry comes down from its basin, has an authentic legend as retreat of Ewen Macphee, perhaps the last British outlaw above the rank of a lurking poacher or illicit distiller. Early in the nineteenth century he enlisted in a Highland regiment, from which he deserted, and though captured and handcuffed, made a romantic escape to his native wilds of Glengarry. After camping in the woods till the hue and cry after him had died out, he settled on an islet of Loch Oich, where he took to himself a wife and reared a sturdy brood. For long he played Rob Roy on a small scale, “lifting” sheep and helping himself to game, while he enjoyed the sanctity of a seer’s reputation. When a southern landlord bought the property, he established a not unfriendly _modus vivendi_ with this tackless tenant, who introduced himself to the new owner by sticking his dirk into the table as title-deed to his island--“By this right I hold it!” But by and by the minions of the law pressed upon his retreat; and in spite of a resolute defence, in which his wife handled a gun like a modern Helen Macgregor, he was arrested for sheep stealing, and taken to prison, where he pined away after a long life of lawless freedom. Bales of sheep skins and tallow, found hidden about his fastness, were evidence of how he had lived at the expense of his neighbours, a feature too much left out of sight in modern regret for the picturesque old times. Banavie--that seems to be a kilted cousin of Banff, and forebear of the Rocky Mountain paradise an American geographer presumes to spell _Bamf_--is close to Fort-William, the southernmost of the three military posts that bridled the Great Glen. In Stuart days this was Inverlochy, scene of that battle between Montrose and Argyle. It is now a town of snug hotels, over which rises the proclaimed monarch of British mountains, his gloomy brow often crowned with mist and his precipitous shoulders ermined with snow at any season. But if the weather favour, from the Observatory Tower at the top,