The Goblin Cave here seems to have been made too much of in Scott’s imagination, like John Ridd’s Doone houses and the Water-slide on Exmoor; but the whole region is dotted with hiding-holes that sometimes bear Rob’s name. Ellen’s Isle, that shrine of pilgrims, may often have served him as a refuge. Many a time must he have tramped by this chain of lovely lakes, in no more appreciative humour than a certain drover who, being admonished on his way back from Stirling market that in London he could have sold his beasts for twelve pounds a head, sullenly replied that if he could take Loch Lomond to an unmentionable region it would fetch “a pound a tot.” The gracious name of Loch Katrine is in some spellings degraded into Loch Cateran, as lair of robbers; but different derivations have been suggested, for one, a root found in other Highland names, _Urrin_, which denotes a Celtic hell. That was the native idea of a rough and bristly country through which cattle-driving made awkward work, with the owners of a stolen herd close at the heels of the spoilers. The Highlandmen were slow to understand what strangers could admire in this country, visited by occasional pilgrims of the picturesque, even before Scott gave it such fame that Dr. Graham can record how twenty-two carriages had stopped in one day at the chief inn of Callander, and how a London artist had “actually” spent a whole winter working among those wild mountains. This minister of Aberfoyle wrote an early guide-book, entitled _Sketches of Perthshire_; but he hardly gets farther into the Highlands than the southern edge, widely advertised by the _Lady of the Lake’s_ popularity, when _Waverley_ and _Rob Roy_ were still in the womb of time. Cold-hearted Southrons may look with curious or complimentary eyes upon this half-Highland region, which to its natives was peopled not only with carnal but with ghostly enemies, albeit of more romantic form and quickened by warmer fancy than in the case of those exhaled from flatter claylands. The most familiar spirits of the Highlands were the “Men of Peace” or “Good People” who lived underground in green hillocks, which by spectacled archæologists have been connected with the conical huts of a race of pigmy aborigines, whose shy prowlings in flesh and blood came to pass for fairy tales. The abductions and other tricks ascribed to them in later days may well have been the doings of caterans, walking in the darkness of superstition. Like the Eumenides, the Highland fairies were to be spoken of by good names, in dread of their turn for impish mischief. They had a favourite trick of carrying off mortals to their underground dwellings, and held special power over unbaptised children, who must be guarded against them night and day. Traditions of their pranks are common all over Scotland, from the leading cases of True Thomas the Rhymer and Tam Lin, whose body and soul stood in sore jeopardy among them.