skiffs, is in view, the waters yielding up their wealth of nourishment to the industrious fisherman. There too are the winding Kyles of Bute, as much worthy of being immortalised in verse as the well-sung Isles of Greece. The eye loves to linger on the soft-looking waters of the inland seas; and again and again we gaze upon the Cobbler as he keeps watch over the waters of Loch Long, or scan the placid expanse of Lochfyne. The late Miss Catharine Sinclair very happily said that a portion of Lochfyne is fine only in name, and I can well agree with her while looking at the rocky sides of Cantyre; but giving reins to the imagination, we can fill up the scene and picture the savages of a few thousand years ago fishing from the rocks with their bone-tipt spears, and hauling the produce of their skill out of the waters with rough branches of trees; and, as time flies onward, we can note in our mind’s eye the rude canoes as they progress into ships becoming instruments of commerce and tokens of civilisation. At our very feet are the immense masses of granite that form the mountain on which we stand; and near at hand, towering up alongside, are the cones of two other hills, forming with Goatfell a silent council of three that seem to be ever engaged in mysterious communing. The silence on the mountain-tops is wonderful, indeed oppressive: there is not a sound to relieve the ear except perhaps a roar of water, howling and hissing and boiling in endless torture in one of the valleys; and as the wind fitfully moans as it soughs adown some weird vale, half hidden from us by the clouds that float over it, the scene looks “So wondrous wild, the whole might seem The scenery of a fairy dream.”