There are fences and gates to the royal domicile, but there is hardly an attempt to alter its character within, unless by a round plot of rhododendrons offering a few late blossoms. But all nature, however stern and savage, smiles on a July day. The purple heather-bell is in bloom, the tiny blue milkwort and the yellow rock-rose help to make a summer carpet which is rendered still gayer by many a pale peach- coloured orchis and by an occasional spray of wild roses, deeper in the rose than the same flower is in the low countries, or by a tall white foxglove. Loch Muich may be desolation itself when the heather and bracken are sere, when the lowering sky breathes nothing save gloom, and chill mist-wreaths creep round its precipices; but when the air is buoyant in its tingling sharpness, when the dappled white clouds are reflected in water--blue, not leaden, and there is enough sunshine to cast intermittent shadows on the hillsides and the loch, though a transient darkness and a patter of raindrops vary the scene, it has its day and way of blossoming. The Queen's house or shiel of the Glassalt stands near the head of the two miles long loch, just beyond the point where the Glassalt burn comes leaping and dashing down the hillside. Here, too, is a small sheltering fir and birch plantation, though not large enough to hide the full view of the sentinel hills. A "roundel" of _Alpenrosen_, or dwarf rhododendrons, is the only break in the growth of moss and heather. The loch is so near the house that a stone thrown by a child's hand from the windows of the principal rooms would fall into the watery depths.