In front of us we have Hairschaw Hill to the right, then Blackhill and Middle Law, and between the latter two the road to Strathaven is seen to wind, and we recall the long walk from and to Glasgow which Edward Irving and Carlyle took one day, when the one was the popular assistant to Dr. Chalmers, and the other had not yet been able to do anything to show the stuff of which he was made. Looking north is the little and now almost extinct mining village of Glenbuck, with its two artificial lochs, the only sheets of water in the parish, constructed in 1802 to supply the works of James Finlay & Co., at Catrine, covering between them 120 acres. The Water of Ayr (smooth water) rises out of these, and flows before our eyes through the village of Muirkirk, a small stream, and then among holms and haughs through an open moor till joined by a little stream which rises near Priesthill, and by “the haunted Garpel” it becomes a large body of water. Still farther north, over Blackhill, is Priesthill, where on the 1st of May, 1685, John Brown, of saintly memory, whose house was always open to the benighted stranger or to the persecuted in the days of the Covenant, was shot before the eyes of his wife, by the bloody Claverhouse, his very soldiers refusing to do the deed. It will be long before Scotland will forget the noble answer of his wife to the brutal remark of his murderer, “What do ye think of your husband now?” “I always thought much of him, but now more than ever.” Close by at the farm of High Priesthill, during a thunderstorm, about forty years ago, a waterspout fell, washing away some 30 acres of the land. Looking up the valley of the Douglas Water, which takes its rise at the foot of Cairntable, on the north-east side, we see the policies of Douglas Castle, the seat of the Earl of Home, and the “Castle Dangerous” of Sir Walter Scott; and we recall to our minds that we have in it a name intimately connected with the most splendid period of Scottish history. It is an open question still whether the family gave the name to the parish, or _vice versa_. The favourite tradition, however, is that about 767 Donald Bain the Fair took the field against the King. He was nearly victorious, when a person, with his sons and followers, flew to the help of the King and routed Donald, who was himself slain. The King thus rescued inquired to whom he owed his deliverance, when one of the officers said, “Sholto Douglasse” (there is the dark man). The King, in gratitude, gave him a tract of land and the surname Douglas, which was given to the domain and the river also. This appears to have some confirmation from the fact that Sholto is still a kind of hereditary prænomen among various branches of the Douglas family.