threaten the mouth of his native Dee. Whatever this people’s hand finds to do, it has been apt to do it with might and main. What it chiefly finds to do in our day is the rearing of cattle, that seem to thrive best on the promontories of our island; then also Galloway has given its name to a hardy horseflesh, and pigs, too, are largely reared in this region. Such an authority as the author of _Field and Fern_ judges no beef better than that which matches the brawn of Galloway men. And these tall fellows have the name of living to a good old age, as witness the Galloway story of a man of threescore and ten found “greeting” when his father had given him “his licks” for throwing stones at his grandfather. By this time the reader must have an inkling how the names Highland and Lowland are but relative. The knobbed area of Scotland, which, as a native boasted, would be as big as England “if ye flattened it oot,” consists mainly of two uplands, that of the south smaller, greener, and less boldly mountainous, between which dips a more thickly peopled interval, at one point but forty miles broad from sea to sea, where only the rich river straths and the coast plains are right lowlands, never out of sight of sheep-dotted hills. Galloway is mainly a wild region of rocks, lochs, moors, and bogs, in the north rising to mountains almost as high as any in England. This ground seems too much neglected by tourists, who yet might find here and there smart hotels to their mind, oftener the more old-fashioned inns where they would have to do not with managers and foreign waiters, but with housewifely Meg Dods and decent servant lasses, now instructed by the spread of knowledge no longer to mistake a tooth-brush as an instrument for sharpening the appetite before dinner. We Scots have a grudge against southrons for the degree to which they have sophisticated the hotels on more frequented routes, especially in the matter of charges. The butterfly-travellers as well as the bee-travellers should have a grievance against their landlords (Limited) not so much for making hay while the holiday sun shines, as for the tyranny that tries to impose upon them boarding-house regulations at Piccadilly prices. My grudge at those exotic caravanserais is that they try to set all their guests “feeding like one,” and draw out the chief meal of the day through that sweetest hour of the northern summer-- ’Twixt the gloaming and the mirk, When the kye come hame. [Illustration: A BIRCH-WOOD IN SPRINGTIME, BY LOCH MAREE, ROSS-SHIRE]