To-day we started to climb Roneval, the highest mountain in South Harris. It has been polished by ice all over, a splendid confirmation of what I had already described in my book. What a magnificent view I had from the top! Far away to the west was St Kilda and the little island of Berneray. Southwards stretched the various islands of the Outer Hebrides--North Uist, Benbecula, South Uist, and Barra. How plainly seen they all were--high mountains with broad plains at their feet, over which were dotted lakes innumerable. In the east, Skye with its wonderful Coolins lay spread out before us; and north of Skye I could see our old friend Ben Slioch, and the mountains of Loch Maree and Loch Torridon. Harris, of course, lay under our feet: and you can form no idea of its sterile desolation. Endless round-backed hills and rocks, scraped bare of any soil, and supporting hardly a vestige of vegetation; great rocky mountains, smoothed and polished all over and equally bare and desolate, with blue lakelets scattered in hundreds among the hollows and depressions of the land--such is the appearance of Harris. Then there lay the great blue sea shining like sapphire in the sun, and flecked with tiny sails where the fishermen are busy at their calling.--I began this letter outside to escape the peat-reek, but the midges have driven me in again! LOCHMADDY, NORTH UIST, _Tuesday, 10th July 1877_. We got here yesterday, after a long and very tedious sail in an open boat. With a good wind we should have crossed the Sound of Harris in two hours--instead of which we were nine hours. We kept dodging about from islet to islet, sighing for a breeze, but no breeze would come--what little wind there was being in the wrong direction. We landed hungry as hawks, or any other animal of prey, and found a very comfortable inn. Of course we were offered the usual ham and eggs, but prevailed upon the landlady to give us fish instead. This place is like the sweepings of creation. It is made up of irregular bits of land, all jumbled about in a shallow sea--or of bits of sea running into the flat land in all directions--so that to get to a place one mile in direct distance you may have to walk five or six or even ten miles, if you can’t get a boat. It is a land of desolation and dreariness. Bare rocky hills form the eastern coast, and from the foot of these the low undulating rocky and peaty land stretches for some ten or twelve miles to the Atlantic. The land, as I have said, is everywhere intersected by the sea, and sprinkled with innumerable lakes and peaty tarns. Along the flat Atlantic coast there are dreary stretches of blown yellow sands that form hills like those of Barry, near Carnoustie. Near these are a few huts and a kirk and manse! Not a tree, not even a bush higher than heather is anywhere to be seen--peat and rock and water--water and rock and peat--that is North Uist.... I