The Cathedral, as well as the Falls of Braan, the Rumbling Bridge and other lions are in the grounds of the Duke of Atholl, _the_ Duke of this part of the world. The Duke of fifty years ago was a “character” who might be styled the last of the great Highland chiefs. This generation may have forgotten the sensation caused by his trying to shut the way through Glen Tilt, and his personal encounter with two Cambridge undergraduates, who got the best of the scrimmage. Among Leech’s most effective sketches in _Punch_ were that “Ducal Dog in the Manger” and the cartoon in which His Grace appeared playing the part of Roderick Dhu to the young Sassenachs. It was said that the Duke took his revenge on the artist by inviting him to shoot, the highest honour that can be hoped for in that part of the world; and in the end the pass was opened by a chieftain “so late dishonoured and defied.” Since his day the champion obstructionist of this district was the veteran Sir Robert Menzies, who lately died much respected in the Rannoch country, in spite of an extraordinary itch for litigation, with his own family as well as with strangers. His most famous “ganging law plea” perhaps was with a railway company that, by the hands of half-a-dozen porters, had dragged the chieftain out of a carriage in which his ticket did not entitle him to ride. The fate of a reverend English tourist who landed from Loch Rannoch on his grounds was told with a shudder; and I must be thankful for my own escape when caught in the act of more than barefaced trespass in bounds where stranger was not always “a holy name.” With a friend of mine, in our hot youth, I had gone in to swim, when on the lake bank we heard a stern voice and looked back to see Sir Robert’s tartans waving over our clothes. Thus “at advantage ta’en,” I dare not say that now _our_ blood Kept on its wont and tempered flood But the “dangerous chief,” seeing nothing in our Arcadian innocence to chafe his mood or cloud his brow, turned off with a courteous salutation--“Doubt not aught from mine array!”--and the sun’s next glance shone “on bracken green and cold grey stone.” Across the Tay from Dunkeld, in the old duke’s time, reigned an eccentric laird, to whose taste for building are due the baronial Birnam Hotel and other costly structures in the neighbourhood. Mrs. Oliphant hangs the scenes of a novel about his own empty and unfinished mansion; and the chief building among the woods of Murthly is now an Asylum. As for Birnam Wood, that has long marched off the face of the earth, to bear out the truth of Shakespeare’s legend; but one or two ancient trees are pointed out as stragglers. Birnam was a favourite haunt of Millais, a keen sportsman as well as lover of the scenery which forms oases in the later stage of his art, when he seemed too much concerned to boil that large pot in Palace Gate.