Thus to him, too, “Caledonia stern and wild” could breathe her secret, while to put life into the raids and combats of long ago was for another bard who plays drum and trumpet in the orchestra of British poetry. I am not going to string vain epithets on the Trossachs, familiar to all readers if only from the pages of their great advertiser. But let me hint to tourists who come duly furnished with the _Lady of the Lake_, that Black’s _Guide to the Trossachs_ includes an excellent commentary on the poem from what may seem an unpoetical source, the pen of an Astronomer-Royal, Sir G. B. Airey, whose topographical analysis will be found most instructive. These scenes appear somewhat trimmed since an old writer described the Highlands “as a part of the creation left undrest.” The lake edges have been smoothed off, as the “unfathomable glades” of the Trossachs are opened up by a road, below the line of the old pass and the hill tracks by which the Fiery Cross was sped towards Strath-Ire. For an account of this country as it is in our day, we may refer to a French story by a writer named, of all names, André Laurie, whose native heath ought to be the bonny braes of Maxwelton. This book has the serious purpose of giving a view of English school athletics, and pointing the moral that Frenchmen so trained would be all the fitter for _la revanche_. The hero, sent to school in England, is, as part of his educational course, taken by the schoolmaster on a shooting excursion in the Highlands. [Illustration: VEILED SUNSHINE, THE TROSSACHS, PERTHSHIRE] They put up at the _White Heart_, one of the principal hotels of _Glascow_, and the landlord is so interested in their bold enterprise that he personally conducts them on the _chasse aux grouses_. Nay more, he equips them with a pack of piebald pointers, well trained to retrieve in water, which he had come by in a remarkable manner: a certain Lord Stilton, breakfasting at the hotel, with true British generosity made his host a present of these matchless hounds by way of _largesse_ for an excellent dish of trout--a rare treat, it seems, in this part of the world.