These days, Captain Montreville and his daughter passed in examining this picturesque city--its public libraries, its antique castle, its forsaken palace, and its splendid scenery. But nothing in its singular environs more charmed the eye of Laura than one deserted walk, where, though the noise of multitudes stole softened on the ear, scarcely a trace of human existence was visible, except the ruin of a little chapel which peeped fancifully from the ledge of a rock, and reminded her of the antick gambols of the red deer on her native hills, when, from the brink of the precipice, they look fearless into the dell below. Captain Montreville next conducted his daughter to the top of the fantastic mountain that adorns the immediate neighbourhood of Edinburgh, and triumphantly demanded whether she had ever seen such a prospect. But Laura was by no means disposed to let Perthshire yield the palm to Lowland scenery. Here indeed, the prospect was varied and extensive, but the objects were too various, too distant, too gay--they glared on the eye--the interest was lost. The serpentine corn-ridges, offensive to agricultural skill; the school, with its well frequented Gean-tree; the bright green clover fields, seen at intervals through the oak coppice; the church, half hid by its venerable ash trees; the feathery birch, trembling in the breath of evening; the smoking hamlet, its soft colours blending with those of the rocks that sheltered it; the rill, dashing with fairy anger in the channel which its winter fury had furrowed--these were the simple objects which had charms for Laura, not to be rivalled by neat enclosures and whitened villas. Yet the scenes before her were delightful, and had not Captain Montreville's appeal recalled the comparison, she would, in the pleasure which they excited, have forgotten the less splendid beauties of Glenalbert. Montreville pointed out the road that led to England. Laura sent a longing look towards it, as it wound amid woods and villages and gentle swells, and was lost to the eye in a country which smiled rich and inviting from afar. She turned her eyes where the Forth is lost in the boundless ocean, and sighed as she thought of the perils and hardships of them who go down to the sea in ships. Montreville, unwilling to subject her to the inconveniencies of a voyage, had proposed to continue his journey by land, and Laura herself could not think without reluctance of tempting the faithless deep. The scenery, too, which a journey promised to present, glowed in her fervid imagination with more than nature's beauty. Yet feeling the necessity of rigid economy, and determined not to permit her too indulgent parent to consult her accommodation at the expence of his prudence, she it was, who persuaded Montreville to prefer a passage by sea, as the mode of conveyance best suited to his finances.