The stranger who, to a panorama of celebrated scenes flitting before his strained eyes, prefers settling down and photographing on memory characteristically charming landscapes, could not do better than set up his tent at Comrie, where he may come in for the excitement of one of its slight earthquakes. Among the many excursions radiating hence, he must not neglect to follow up the Earn to its parent lake. The last time I took this lovely walk, it was in company with the late Dr. Andrew Melville, Clerk of the Free Church, a name well-known in Scotland as reviving that of his forbears, the Reformation champions. He made his summer home at Comrie, which, through another sojourner, the widow of Lord Chancellor Cairns, had come to be a resort of the English sect called Plymouth Brethren; and I recall his telling me on our walk how a party of sisters of that ilk, invited together to a house at Comrie, proved to be hardly on speaking terms after a rent in this exclusive communion. It is not only in Scotland that Seceders split up into Auld Lichts and New. And in Scotland, by the way, the Wee Free Church that lately made such a profitable contention for the faith as once delivered to Calvinistic saints, begins to generate a fissiparous ferment, having already mutinied against the lay champion who led it to victory and booty. At least sects are fewer in Scotland, which seldom welcomes exotic divinity, its taste being for home-made dissensions. A local writer has an amusing account of a Plymouth Brother, at Crieff, roaring down a Mormon missionary who promised mounts and marvels across the Atlantic; but the contest did not tend to conversion or edification. Our way up the Earn has led us by several eddies and backwaters of Scottish Protestantism; but now we pass into the shadow of the hills where the cross itself was dipped in fire and blood. When I walked up to Loch Earn with that kindly kinsman of mine, the railway did not go beyond Comrie, as it does now, under outlying masses of Ben Voirlich, where wooded knolls huddle below slopes of turf and rock and fern dappled by patches of brown or purple heather. We are here fairly in the Highlands; and from St. Fillan’s Hill, shooting up over the river, we look down upon a true central Perthshire prospect of a long lake stretching below high mountains; but else, as a disappointed Cockney complained, one can’t see the view for the hills.