The village is no sooner left behind us than we have to put a stout heart to a steep brae. We soon reach the Donich Burn, with its shoals and rapids, its large stones and deep pools, which, although specially dear to the angler, has charms for everybody. We approach cautiously and watch the trout—how alternately mouth and gills open and close, keeping up an incessant pumping—as they lie behind stones watching for luckless flies. Passing over to the other side as at once the quickest route, and that by which the best views are to be got, we are not very far up till we can see the hills that hem in Loch Long on all its sides, standing up weird-like, jagged and fissured, grim and gruesome, even in fine weather, lending sublime impressiveness to the scene. But the view is one that should be seen on its own merits, not in one, but in varying aspects, if it is to be viewed aright. We felt that if we had been here on either of the two days preceding, in rain and dripping mist, blurring and blotting out the mountain tops, we would have had sufficient compensation in the enlarged size and music of the waterfalls. Even as it was we could see almost every rift and gully on all the hillsides, flashing with small cataracts, which twisted and whirled in mid-air as they fell like veils of silvery gauze. After a day or two’s rain every brawling burn becomes a torrent, and rushes down the valley with resistless force—leaping from rocky heights into water-worn cauldrons that roar, and seethe, and eddy amidst a mist of rebounding spray. In little more than an hour’s walk from where we cross the burn, through bog and heather alternately, we get near to what seems the summit, now sinking an inch or two till we touch the stem of what may be a pre-Adamite tree slowly turning into peat, and now almost putting our foot on the tail of a grouse, which first gets a fright, and then gives its back to us as we startle at the “whirr, whirr,” with which it hurries off beyond our reach.