"The country was very wild and dreary. There was nothing to be seen all around but hills and mountains, all covered with brakes and ferns, and moss and heather. There were no woods, no pastures, no fields, and no farm houses. It was the dreariest-looking country I ever saw. In the middle of the way we came to some old stone hovels, with thatched roofs--very dismal-looking dwellings indeed. There was usually one door and one little window by the side of it. The window was about as big as you would make for a horse, in the side of a stable. I looked into one of these hovels. There was no floor, only flat stones laid in the ground, and scarcely any furniture. The Irish shanties, where they are making railroads in America, are very pretty houses compared to them. "The driver told us that the whole country belonged to a duke. He keeps it to shoot grouse in, in the fall of the year. The grouse is a bird like a partridge. They live on the heather. I saw some of them flying about. "The road was very good. The duke made it, the driver said. We could see the road a great way before us, along the valley. By and by we saw some people coming. They were a great way off, but we could see that they were travellers, by the umbrellas, and shawls, and knapsacks they had in their hands. Presently we could see a man coming up a hill just before them with a wheelbarrow load of trunks that he was wheeling along. So we knew that it was a party of travellers, coming across from Loch Katrine to Loch Lomond; but we wondered why they did not take a machine, and ride. "When we came up to them we stopped a moment to talk to them. There were two gentlemen and two ladies. One of the ladies looked pretty tired. They said that there were no machines on the side of the mountain where they came from, and that there was a party there, that arrived before them, who had engaged the first machines that should come; and so they were obliged to walk, and to have their trunks wheeled over on a wheelbarrow. "Afterwards we met another party walking in the same way, with their trunks on a wheelbarrow. We thought that five miles was a great way to wheel trunks on a wheelbarrow. "At last we came to what they called Loch Katrine; but it seemed to me nothing but a pond among the mountains. It was only about ten miles long. There was an inn on the shore, but no village. "There was a pier there, too, and some boats drawn up on the beach. At a little distance they were putting together an iron steamboat on the stocks. The parts were all made in Glasgow, and brought here by the same way that we had come. The old steamboat of last year was floating in the water near by. The steampipe was rusty, and she looked as if she had been abandoned. The name of her was the Rob Roy. "We were glad that the new one was not ready, for we liked better to go in a row boat.