The Beauty of the West Highland Seaboard--Dr. Aiton of Dolphinton--Dr. Norman Macleod--Specimen of Turtle-Dove (Columba Turtur) shot in Ardgour--The belief on the Continent of its value as a Household Pet--Bechstein--Male Birds dropping Eggs in confinement. If somewhat over-showery for the comfort of tourists, whose season [June 1871] may now be said to have fairly commenced, the weather with us on the west coast is at least all that the agriculturist and sheepowner could wish it to be, for pasture everywhere is rich and abundant to a degree that has rarely been known even here, while crops of all kinds never perhaps presented a healthier or more luxuriant growth. The truth is that a certain amount of rainfall, and that amount a large one, is absolutely necessary for the wellbeing of our crops in the West Highlands, and the longer we live the more do we feel the truth and force of the saying of a shrewd old gentleman, at his own dinner table many years ago, to the effect that he had always observed that the season in which there was some difficulty in getting peats secured in good condition was invariably the best for Lochaber and the neighbouring districts from a pastoral and agricultural point of view. This is particularly observable this year, for while you cannot as yet see a stack of this season's peats anywhere, the country is clothed in richer, greener verdure, the woods are leaner, and crops of every description more luxuriant than we can recollect to have been the case for at least a dozen years past. If anybody wishes to see the West Highlands in all their magnificence and beauty, now is the season, for, go where you may, turn whithersoever you will, wander forth at any hour and in any direction, you cannot fail to be charmed with the infinite variety of pictures that present themselves for your admiration, pictures which, while they only charm and enchant the ordinary beholder, delight at once and distress the artist--delight him by their marvellous beauties, but distress him not the less, because he cannot with all his cunning transfer these beauties in their entirety to canvas. An American gentleman whom we met the other day candidly confessed that, although he had gone over most of his native land, and made the tour of Continental Europe and the East, he had not in all his travels seen anything more beautiful than the shores of Loch Linnhe, Loch Leven, and Lochiel at sunset on a fine evening in June. The late Dr. Aiton of Dolphinton told us on his return from Palestine that he had seen nothing at all to equal Loch Linnhe on a summer's evening. In all the breadth of his native Doric, which he always employed in familiar conversation, he declared there was "naething in a' the Archipelago till touch't," and we have heard Dr. Norman Macleod on his return from India express himself very much to the same effect. The Queen says in her Journal that