Travellers of Mr. Hall’s period had no admiration for the “dreary glen of Abernethy,” nor much for the more richly planted Glenfarg into which it leads, the latter now the main pass from Fife into Perthshire. But this tourist parson duly admired the view from the Wicks of Baiglie, extolled by Scott as unmatched in Britain, yet commonly missed by railroad tourists since the leisurely day when the charms of Glenfarg inspired Ruskin, at the precocious age of seven, to verse which may be left unquoted. The Ruskin carriage, indeed, came by the new turnpike that shirks that higher ground where Scott gained life-long memories of the delight with which, as a boy of fifteen, making his first independent excursion, from the back of his pony he looked down on such an “inimitable landscape.” This reminiscence of his touches a chord in my own heart, for it was on a boy’s pony that I, too, made wide [Illustration: A HIGHLAND LAKE] acquaintance with Strathearn and Strath Tay. But in my case there were hindrances that may not have presented themselves to the begetter of _Waverley_. To him this choice country might not be so much shut up by high park walls, or by enclosures of the rich strath lands. And in my day there were toll bars on the roads, when a schoolboy’s pocket-money was scrimper than seems to be the lot of this generation. One could not ride a dozen miles in any direction without counting the cost. The cheapest roads were twopenny ones, which thus became the most familiar. On one or two, the charge for my small steed was threepence, which required more consideration. One forbidding highway proudly demanded fourpence, though on it you could trot a couple of miles before reaching the expensive barrier. And when one had treated oneself to a fourpenny scamper along it, there came a second lion on that path. For more than a mile a railway ran beside the road, on the same level, separated only by a hedge, as alarming to inexperienced Highland shelties as the broad bridge on which another railway crossed another road askew, so as to form a miniature Grotto of Prosilippo, where overhead might come rumbling an invisible thunderstorm as one sped through its gloomy pass. Once, having paid my fourpence, I had pushed on almost to the end of the perilous stretch, when a train puffed and rattled up to meet me, which my horsemanship failed to make the pony face in a philosophic spirit. For all I could do, it swerved round and took to racing the engine along the flat road, for a time keeping company with its bogy. On that highway race, John Gilpin would not have been in it. If I had no wig to fly away, and no stone bottles swinging by my side, what bothered me was having an open knife in my hand, with which I had been cutting a switch from the hedgerow, as the monster came upon us from round a corner. Our headlong course was at last stopped by a gipsy or such-like wayfarer, as shamefaced guerdon for whom I had only twopence in my pocket, nearly