Menteith, one of the chief provinces of old Scotland, has shrunk to the name of a district described in a witty booklet by a son of the soil, far travelled in other lands.[A] “A kind of sea of moss and heath, a bristly country (Trossachs is said to mean the bristled land) shut in by hills on every side,” in which “nearly every hill and strath has had its battles between the Grahams and the Macgregors”; but now “over the Fingalian path, where once the red-shank trotted on his Highland garron, the bicyclist, the incarnation of the age, looks to a sign-post and sees _This hill is dangerous_.” Its stony fields and lochans lying between hummocks are horizoned by grand mountains, among which Ben Lomond, to the west, is the dominating feature, “in winter, a vast white sugar-loaf; in summer, a prismatic cone of yellow and amethyst and opal lights; in spring, a grey, gloomy, stony pile of rocks; in autumn, a weather indicator; for when the mist curls down its sides, and hangs in heavy wreaths from its double summit ‘it has to rain,’ as the Spaniards say.” [A] _Notes on the District of Menteith_, by R. B. Cunninghame Graham. Menteith became a resort before Callander, when, early in the eighteenth century, we find Clerk of Penicuik taking [Illustration: HEAD OF LOCH LOMOND, LOOKING UP GLEN FALLOCH, PERTHSHIRE] his family there on a “goat’s whey campaign,” for which remedy the Highland borders were often visited in his day. At an earlier day, canny Lowlanders would be shy of trusting themselves, on business or pleasure, beyond the Forth; and, even later, we know how Bailie Nicol Jarvie thought twice before venturing into the haunts of that “honest” kinsman of his. As Ben Lomond dominates this landscape, so looms out the memory of Rob Roy Macgregor, that doughty outlaw who, like Robin Hood, has taken such hold on popular imagination. Graham as he is, one suspects the above-quoted representative of the old earls to have his heart with an ancestral enemy who practised a kind of wild socialism-- To spoil the spoiler as he may, And from the robber rend the prey.