The view, even half way up, is not to be despised, the beauty of which consists in its “breadth,” as an artist would say. The meadows, with their green frames of hedges, may be compared to small cabinet pictures—lovely, but small. This is life-like—a broad cartoon from the hand of nature. The sward rises and rolls along in undulations like the slow heave of an ocean wave. Handsome trees of all sorts are scattered around, under whose ample shade cattle can, and, to judge from the brown and bare patches around their trunks, evidently do, repose in the heat of the day. Following up the stream, which in its higher reach is called the Laggan Burn, we come on two smaller cascades, and after a pleasant and comparatively easy ascent up the fretted terraces of trap, reach the summit, 1894 feet above the sea level, 3 miles to the north of the station we have left, and at the meeting point of Killearn, Campsie, and Strathblane parishes. The climb to the top will well repay a visit, as will readily be believed when we say that the eye embraces a range of scenery extending all the way from Ben Lomond to Tinto. The prospect before us is of the most beautiful description; the vast basin of the Clyde from Kilpatrick to Dechmont lying stretched at our feet, with Glasgow, Paisley, and many other towns and villages scattered on its breast; while the line of the horizon is formed by the Gleniffer, Fereneze, and Cathkin braes. Immediately below us is the valley of the Blane, or Warm River; and we cannot help acknowledging that Strathblane (the valley of the Warm River) is a word that is peculiarly descriptive of the valley, which is sheltered in almost every direction from the violence of the winds. The probability is that, with part of Campsie (the crooked strath, according to some), it was at some long-past date a fresh-water loch, and that subsequently the barriers in the direction of Loch Lomond were broken down, and the valley drained accordingly. The nature of the soil contributes to establish this opinion, consisting largely of sand, gravel, and other comminuted fragments of the neighbouring rocks. The valley of the Blane, as it winds its way westward from the bare and desolate conical hill of Dunglass, 400 feet high, on the east, to the conical and finely wooded hill of Dunquaich, on the west, also 400 feet high, is one of the prettiest in Scotland, quite equal to and not unlike the drive between Crieff and St. Fillans, which Dr. John Brown, in his “Horæ Subsecivæ,” calls the finest 13 miles in Scotland.