“The lowland farm stands amid its neighbours along the highway, with square fields, trim fences, slated houses, cultivated after the most scientific method, and to the last inch, a very type of a shrewd, thrifty, utilitarian people. The Highland farm is half-a-dozen patches of as many shapes scattered along the hillside, wherever there are fewest stones and deepest soil and no bog, and those the crofter tills as best he can--sometimes getting a harvest, and sometimes seeing the first snow cover his oats in the sheaf, sometimes building a rude dyke to keep off the big, brown, hairy cattle that come down to have a taste of the sweet green corn, but often finding it best to let his barefooted children be a fence by day, and at certain seasons to sit up all night himself to guard his scanty harvest from the forays of the red deer. Somewhere among the patches he builds his low-roofed house, and thatches it over with straw, on which by and by, grass with heather and wild flowers begins to grow, till it is not easy to tell his home from the hill. His farm is but a group of tiny islands amid a sea of heather that is ever threatening to overwhelm them with purple spray. Anyone can understand that this man will be unpractical, dreamy, enthusiastic, the child of the past, the hero of hopeless causes, the seer of visions.” We have already crossed the Highland line to the Trossachs. Now, in a few hours’ walk by less famous scenes, let me lead the reader right up into the Highlands [Illustration: THE GRAMPIANS FROM BOAT OF GARTEN, INVERNESS-SHIRE] from the North Inch of Perth. Our way shall be the green banks of the Almond, with only now and then a turning aside on the roads which are seldom the most pleasing features of a Scottish countryside. The name, properly _Almaine_, as Wordsworth has it, seems of the same origin as the Irish Bog of Allen, _Moine Almhaine_ in Celtic. There is more than one Almond in Scotland, which has countless streams of which this is a type, a true Highland water, now gathering into creamy pools, now rushing over pebbly shallows, here pent in a leafy glen, there rippling by open fields and works of man, everywhere wilful, cheerful, and eager.