right of the road is called TIGHNAFEAD, _i.e._ whistle-house (_fead_, a whistle, Latin _fides_), which set my philological fancy immediately on the imagination that this exposed place was so called from some peculiar whistling of the blast down from the hills immediately behind; but such imaginations are very unsafe; for the fact turned out to be, if somewhat less poetical, certainly much more comfortable, that this house of call, in times within memory, stood at a greater distance from the road than it now does, which caused the traveller, when he came down the descent on a cold night, sharp-set for a glass of strong whisky, to make his presence and his wish known by a shrill whistle across the hollow. So much for _tigh_. The only other remark that I would make here is, that the word _clachan_, so well known from Scott’s Clachan of Aberfoyle, does not properly mean a village, as Lowlanders are apt to imagine, but only a churchyard, or, by metonymy, a church--as the common phrase used by the natives, _Di domhnaich dol do’n chlachan_, “going to church on Sunday,” sufficiently proves--the word properly meaning only the stones in the churchyard, which mark the resting-place of the dead; and if the word is ever used for a village, it is only by transference to signify the village in which the parish church is, and the parish churchyard. But it is not only the dwellings of men, but their actions, that make places interesting; and as the march of events in great historical movements generally follows the march of armies, it follows that camps and battle-fields and military settlements will naturally have left strong traces in the topography of every country where human beings dwell. And accordingly we find that the _chester_ and the _caster_, added as a generic term to so many English towns, are simply the sites of ancient Roman _castra_ or camps; while Cologne, on the Rhine, marks one of the most prosperous of their settlements in Germany. Curiously analogous to this is the _Cöln_, a well-known quarter of Berlin, on the Spree, where the German emperors first planted a Teutonic colony in the midst of a Sclavonic population. In the solemn march of Ossianic poetry, the word _blar_ generally signifies a field of battle; but, as this word properly signifies only a large field or open space, we have no right to say that such names as BLAIR ATHOL and BLAIRGOWRIE have anything to do with the memory of sanguinary collisions. ALEXANDRIA, in Egypt, is one of the few remaining places of note that took their name from the brilliant Macedonian Helleniser of the East. ALEXANDRIA, in the vale of Leven, in Dumbartonshire, tells of the family of Smollett, well known in the annals of Scottish literary genius, and still, by their residence, adding a grace to one of the most beautiful districts of lake scenery in the world. ADRIANOPLE stereotypes the memory of one of the most notable of the Roman emperors, who deemed it