Among Scotsmen, Dunblane enjoys a modest repute as a place of _villeggiatura_; to tourists it is perhaps best known as junction of the Caledonian line to Oban, which brings them to Callander, a few miles from the Trossachs. This line at first follows the course of the Teith, “daughter of three mighty lakes,” past Doune Castle, not Burns’s “Bonnie Doon,” but an imposing monument of feudal struggles and crimes, that has housed many a royal guest, if not, as one of its parish ministers gravely declares for unquestionable, Fitz-James himself on the night before his adventurous chase. So late as 1745, [Illustration: BIRCHES BY LOCH ACHRAY, PERTHSHIRE] Home, the author of _Douglas_, had an adventure here, confined as prisoner of war in a Jacobite dungeon, from which he escaped, with five fellow-captives, in quite romantic style; and this, we know, was one of the stages of Captain Edward Waverley’s journey. Farther up the river, another place of note is Cambusmore, where Scott spent the youthful holidays that made him familiar with the Trossachs country. Callander he does not mention, its name not fitting into his metre, whereas its neighbour Dunblane’s amenity to rhyme brought to be planted there a flower of song at the hands of a writer who perhaps knew it only by name. But Callander has grown into a snug little town of hotels and lodging-houses below most lovely scenery, little spoiled by the chain of lakes above being harnessed as water-works for thirsty Glasgow, whose Bailie Nicol Jarvies now lord it over the country of Rob Roy and Roderick Dhu. Another way to the Trossachs is by “the varied realms of fair Menteith,” through which a railway joins the banks of the Forth and the Clyde. The name of Menteith has an ugly association to Scottish ears through Sir John Menteith, a son of its earl, who betrayed Wallace to the English; the signal for these Philistines’ onrush was given by his turning a loaf upside down, and so to handle bread was long an insult to any man of the execrated name. Sir John afterwards fought under Bruce; but however Scottish nobles might change sides in the game of feudal allegiance, the Commons were always true to patriotic resentment; and no services of that house have quite wiped out the memory of a traitor remembered as Gan among the peers of Charlemagne or Simon Girty on the backwoods frontier of America. And fortune seems to have concurred in the popular verdict, for till even the shadow of it died out in a wandering beggar, little luck went with the title of Menteith, least of all in a claim to legitimate heirship of the Crown; then this earldom seemed doubly cursed when transferred to the Grahams, one of whom was ringleader in the murder of James I.