steamers swinging at anchor on its bosom. All day long the shadows of the clouds, commingled with flecks of sunshine, went drifting over the mountain. At nightfall two great flocks of sheep, each attended by the pensive shepherd in his plaid, and each guided and managed by those wonderfully intelligent collies that are a never-failing delight in these mountain lands, came slowly along the vale and presently vanished in Glen Strae. Nothing then broke the stillness but the sharp cry of the shepherd's dog and the sound of many cataracts, some hidden and some seen, that lapse in music and fall in many a mass of shattered silver and flying spray, through deep, rocky rifts down the mountain-side. After sunset a cold wind came on to blow, and soon the heavens were clear and "all the number of the stars" were mirrored in beautiful Loch Awe. They speak of the southwestern extremity of this lake as the head of it. Loch Awe station, accordingly, is at its foot, near Kilchurn. Nevertheless, "where Macgregor sits is the head of the table," for the foot of the loch is lovelier than its head. And yet its head also is lovely, although in a less positive way. From Loch Awe station to Ford, a distance of twenty-six miles, you sail in a toy steamboat, sitting either on the open deck or in a cabin of glass and gazing at the panorama of the hills on either hand, some wooded and some bare, and all magnificent. A little after passing the mouth of the river Awe, which flows through the black Pass of Brander and unites with Loch Etive, I saw the double crest of great Ben Cruachan towering into the clouds and visible at intervals above them,--the higher peak magnificently bold. It is a wild country all about this region, but here and there you see a little hamlet or a lone farm-house, and among the moorlands the occasional figure of a sportsman, with his dog and gun. As the boat sped onward into the moorland district the mountains became great shapes of snowy crystal, under the sullen sky, and presently resolved into vast cloud-shadows, dimly outlined against the northern heavens, and seemingly based upon a sea of rolling vapour. The sail is past Inisdrynich, the island of the Druids, past Inishail and Inisfraoch, and presently past the lovely ruin of Inischonnel Castle, called also Ardchonnel, facing southward, at the end of an island promontory, and covered thick with ivy. The landing is at Ford Pier, and about one mile from that point you may see a little inn, a few cottages crumbling in picturesque decay, and a diminutive kirk, that constitute the village of Ford. My purpose here was to view an estate close by this village, now owned by Henry Bruce, Esq., but many years ago the domain of Alexander Campbell, Esq., an ancestor of my children, being their mother's grandsire; and not in all Scotland could be found a more romantic spot than the glen by the lochside that shelters the melancholy, decaying, haunted fabric of the old house of Ederline.