With a bright sun overhead, at noon as nearly vertical as it can ever be in our latitudes, and a steady, kindly warmth, and no lack now of genial showers, our West Highlands are now [June 1876] beautiful exceedingly, almost at the height and heyday of their summer loveliness, while crops of all kinds are at their present stage all that we could wish them. Tourists in considerable numbers are already on the move; and coaches and steamers alike are beginning to carry daily increasing crowds of passengers, so delighted with the attention paid them, and the elegance and comfort of their surroundings whether afloat or ashore, that a crack with them, as you chance to forgather of an evening, is always pleasant, for the essentials of a pleasant conversation are there to begin with; they are pleased, and you are glad that it is so; the rest is all smooth sailing. You meet an occasional grumbler of course; a wretch, miserable himself, and anxious to make every one else miserable also. An extraordinary curiosity, in truth, is your thorough grumbler. The faculty would probably explain it all away by a reference to dyspepsia or some serious derangement of liver. From frequent and close study, however, of a not uninteresting phenomenon, we are rather inclined to think otherwise. In the genuine grumbler the disposition to look at things obliquely, and from a false or foreshortened point of view, seems ingrained in and interwoven with his very nature. In everything he says and does you detect a perverseness of disposition and a thrawnness of temper that you cannot believe to be temporary or accidental, but a veritable part and portion of the man's being from the first. The old dictum about the poet, which after all is only true in a sense, is true of the grumbler absolutely. Grumblerus nascitur, non fit; he was born a grumbler, and if you put his mother in the witness box, and she chose to entertain you with reminiscences of his infancy, her testimony, we venture to say, would go to show that he kicked and screamed at existence and all the surroundings of his nursery at the earliest moment possible for such an exhibition, and that this disposition to hit out right and left indiscriminately at every one and everything, grew with his growth and strengthened with his strength, till in fulness of time he became the thoroughbred grumbler who sat opposite you at the table d'hôte a week ago, or rode with you atop of the coach yesterday. With spur on heel, and once fairly in the stirrups, your grumbler is ready to tilt, in dearth of anything more substantial, at his own shadow. Any attempt to mollify him, however well-meant and carefully worded, only makes him worse. Do what you can, he remains a grumbler still--implacable, unappeasable. As we generally meet with him here, his grievances for the most part are as to the steamer or coach by which he has travelled, and the food that he has had to eat. Try to put him right according to your view of it,