visible the railway embankments, the piles of "sleepers," the heaps of steel rails, the sheds of the builders, and the red flag of the dynamite blast. The new road will be a popular line of travel. No land "that the eye of heaven visits" is lovelier than this one. But it may perhaps be questioned whether the exquisite loveliness of the Scottish Highlands will not become vulgarised by over-easiness of accessibility. Sequestration is one of the elements of the beautiful, and numbers of people invariably make common everything upon which they swarm. But nothing can debase the unconquerable majesty of those encircling mountains. I saw "the skyish head" of Ben More, at one angle, and of Ben Lui at another, and the lonely slopes of the Grampian hills; and over the surrounding pasture-land, for miles and miles of solitary waste, the thick, ripe heather burnished the earth with brown and purple bloom and filled the air with dewy fragrance. [Illustration: _Loch Lomond._] This day proved capricious, and by the time the railway train from Crianlarich had sped a little way into Glen Lochy the landscape was once more drenched with wild blasts of rain. Loch-an-Beach, always gloomy, seemed black with desolation. Vast mists hung over the mountain-tops and partly hid them; yet down their fern-clad and heather-mantled sides the many snowy rivulets, seeming motionless in the impetuosity of their motion, streamed in countless ribands of silver lace. The mountain ash, which is in perfect bloom in September, bearing great pendent clusters of scarlet berries, gave a frequent touch of brilliant colour to this wild scenery. A numerous herd of little Highland steers, mostly brown and black, swept suddenly into the picture, as the express flashed along Glen Lochy, and at beautiful Dalmally the sun again came out, with sudden transient gleams of intermittent splendour; so that gray Kilchurn and the jewelled waters of sweet Loch Awe, and even the cold and grim grandeur of the rugged Pass of Brander, were momentarily clothed with tender, golden haze. It was afternoon when I alighted in the seaside haven of Oban; yet soon, beneath the solemn light of the waning day, I once more stood amid the ruins of Dunstaffnage Castle and looked upon one of the most representative, even as it is one of the most picturesque, relics of the feudal times of Scottish history. You have to journey about three miles out of the town in order to reach that place, which is upon a promontory where Loch Etive joins Loch Linnhe. The carriage was driven to it through a shallow water and across some sands which soon a returning tide would deeply submerge. The castle is so placed that, when it was fortified, it must have been well-nigh impregnable. It stands upon a broad, high, massive, precipitous rock, looking seaward toward Lismore island. Nothing of that old fortress now remains except the battlemented walls, upon the top of which there is a walk, and