Our route of course is _via_ Stirling, with its rock and Castle and history; Dunblane, and its ancient cathedral with memories of good Bishop Leighton, and its window facing us, which Ruskin has pronounced the finest of its kind in the country; Doune, with its mills and old castle, to Callander, lying about 256 feet above the level of the sea, on the banks of the river Teith. Here we get our first view of the Ben 4½ miles to the north-west, and prepare to take our walk for the day. When it is remembered that with the exception of the episode at Stirling Castle, the whole scenes of the _Lady of the Lake_ lie within the parish which gives its name to and has its centre in the town of Callander, it will be at once seen that it would be superfluous on our part to describe the scenery _en route_ to the base of Ben Ledi. The best guide book here is the _Lady of the Lake_, “every step and every scene being made classic in the beautiful and vivid word-painting of that poem.” The ascent can be best made from Portnanellen about 2¾ miles from Callander, in the immediate vicinity of Coilantogle Ford. This was “Clan Alpine’s outmost guard,” the place where Roderick Dhu stood vantageless before Fitz James; “but it has lost its romance by the erection of a huge sluice of the Glasgow waterworks.” So thinks a writer in the latest Ordnance Gazetteer. However, as we make for it, crossing the Leny, pattering along its stony bed, after it has come down one of the prettiest passes either in this or any other country, as we admire the hollies thickly covered with berries, and think what an added beauty they will have from the first snows of winter, and as we get a foretaste or two of the mountains and the floods that we are to see before the day is done, we have neither the time nor the mind to be disturbed by thoughts of Glasgow and her waterworks. The best and usual route of ascent can be best learned on the spot before starting. When a beginning is made the way opens up gradually, and as we have so much more that is readable to say, we will dispense with a detailed account of how each of the 3875 feet of the “Mountain of God” is to be covered. The Gaelic name read commonly as _beinn-le-dia_ is more correctly _beinn schleibhte_ or _schleibtean_. According to this latter reading the Ben is not the “Mountain of God,” but the “Mountain of Mountains,” or “Mountain girt with sloping Hills.” And this corresponds with its size and surroundings. It rises from a base of about 11 miles in circuit; in fact it occupies most of the space between Loch Lubnaig on the east, Loch Vennachar on the south, and Glenfinlas on the west. The fact that it has sometimes been called the “Mountain of God” is not due to the shape or size of the hill itself, but to this, that Druidical worship lingered on its summit after it had disappeared from the rest of Scotland.