If Loch Lomond is the queen of Scottish lakes, Ben Lomond is the king of Scottish mountains. He may not reign by divine right in one sense, for there are higher heights than his in this “land of the mountain and the flood,” yet he reigns by almost universal consent. There is none of them all that attracts such a number of visitors from all parts of the world who have heard of his greatness and majesty, beauty, and widely extended dominion. It is the fashion to climb Ben Lomond at least once in a lifetime, and that it has many who worship at its shrine is evident from the otherwise unnecessary comfortable hotel at its base, and the well-marked track which leads to the summit. A return ticket should be taken to Rowardennan, say, on a Saturday morning, from Queen Street low level; the hotel is to the right of the pier, and opposite its garden wall will be found the beginning of the track. The length of slope and the numerous breaks in the way make it a journey of 6 miles. The path seems quite conspicuous from below along a green ridge of hill; but soon it breaks off and dies away into a wet and boggy valley. A little higher up an unheard-of rill becomes quite a little torrent, and a gentle cliff turns into an apparently unscalable crag. The ridge of the hill is green, but like most such lands is soft; and this is the nature of the way till you reach the last stage, which is steeper (excepting near the very summit), and is formed of large fragments of slaty-rocky, intermixed with a kind of sparry marble of considerable size. The first part of the journey is the least agreeable, from its soft and boggy nature; halfway up the lake appears to most advantage, its glassy surface studded with islands, round which appears to breathe a perpetual spring. We are now, however, coming near “the melancholy days—the saddest of the year”; and before we get to the summit and down again a great red ball will look out upon the world for a little space, and then sink down into its shroud of gray cloud. But how beautiful the mountain side is in its autumn robes. “The violin,” said Mendelssohn, when comparing the sounds of an orchestra to the hues in the rainbow, “is the violet”; and in the stealing sweetness of both there is a rare charm. The musician’s well-known comparison of red to the sound of a trumpet is scarcely to be recalled in autumn except for a scarlet berry, shining like a spark here and there in the bushes or the trees, or for the bright stomacher of the robin as he nears the ground trilling his sad flute-like strain. The landscape is quickly becoming like a mezzotint by Bartolozzi—a true study in copperplate. Every shade of brown, many shades of red, and all tinges of green, may be seen in great masses of leaves.