The height of Ben Venue, “the little mountain” (as compared with Ben Lomond), is 2393 feet above the sea level, and the ascent can be easily made in two and a half hours. I have done it in an hour and forty-five minutes from Achray House, but this was without a rest, which I could not advise anyone to repeat. You are now looking down on the world-famed Trossachs. It has been well said that the scenery around the Trossachs “beggars all description,” a phrase more forcible than elegant; still it is true, and only a Scott could do it justice. The whole district has been immortalised by him; but forcible as are his descriptions, they do no more than justice to the original, which has been touched by nature’s fingers with loveliness of no common kind. There is such an assembly of rude and wild grandeur as fills the mind with the most sublime conceptions. It is as if a whole mountain had been torn in pieces and had fallen down by a great convulsion of the earth, and the huge fragments of rocks and rocky wooded hill lie scattered about in confusion for several miles along the side of Loch Katrine. Black and bluff headlands of rock dip down into the unfathomable water, or, to speak more exactly, into a loch which was found recently to be 75 fathoms deep, and which on account of its depth scarcely ever freezes. Then there are deep retiring bays, there are beaches covered with white sand, and grave rugged cliffs with wood which seems as if it grew out of the solid rock. Nothing could well be more wild and desolate than the top of Ben Venue. You may be there and not hear or have heard anything, not even the melody of birds, or the bleating of sheep, or the cry of a shepherd, or the barking of his dog, since you heard the whirr of the partridge in the valley below. At one time the eagle was to be seen here sitting in lonely majesty or sailing through the air, but it is now banished. The heron, however, still stalks among the reeds on the side of the lake in search of his prey, and the wild ducks still gambol on the water, or dive beneath the surface. You look down on the most romantic part of the lake, with the Otter Island, and the “Rob Roy” sailing into the picturesque pier which is hidden by the western end of “Roderick Dhu’s lookout,” where nature is shown to best advantage, where mountains and rocks, which appear to have been thrown around in the rudest forms, are covered with trees and shrubs that give variety and grace and beauty to the scenery.