The smart village of St. Fillans, spreading out along the loch foot in villakins of rusticating townsfolk, is a modern settlement, but it may have had ancient memories to forget, for here, or hereabouts, stood Dundurn, capital of the Pictish land called Fortrenn, which seems to have taken in Angus, along with Strathearn and the lower basin of the Tay. The island in the foreground was in later times lair of a gang of robbers named Neish, who in an ill turn for themselves undertook to rob a servant of the Macnabs, bringing their Christmas fare from Crieff. The Macnab of that day had a round dozen of Samsonlike sons, to whom, at their bare board, he significantly spoke--“The night is the night, were the lads but the lads!” On this hint the twelve set out, dragged a boat across from Loch Tay to Loch Earn, surprised the revelling Neishes at dead of night, and slew all but one youth who managed to slip off. Next morning they greeted their father with the outlaws’ gory heads and the boast, “The lads _were_ the lads!” Another account makes them exclaim on this occasion, “Dread nought!” which has remained the Macnabs’ motto. It is nearly sixty years ago that I spent a summer at St. Fillans, as yet hardly known to the outside world. At times that sojourn comes back to me as a dream of childish delight; but I was too young to gather a faggot of impressions that would serve when-- As less the olden glow abides, And less the chillier heart aspires, With drift-wood beached in past spring tides We light our sullen fires. Perhaps the most prosaic English urchin stores up as warm memories of “days in the distance enchanted,” spent on the fattest claylands or the smoothest fen. Anyhow, one’s heart goes out to the bare-headed and bare-kneed youngsters, “hardy, bold, and wild,” who from the train are seen taking all chances of weather with frolic and glee on the banks of Loch Earn, heedless of the cloud of “Rudiments” and “Delectus” that will loom back upon them with the shortening autumn days. Even less to be envied passengers have a good glimpse of this lake, as upon a shelf above the northern side they are whisked along a fine panorama, with Ben Voirlich’s rugged head for its background. Farther on, the shores grow tamer, where fields come down to the water edge; then, as by the scattering of houses at Lochearnhead the railway winds round its upper end, it overlooks a fine retrospect of the loch’s whole reach from St. Fillans. A few minutes more among bare green slopes, and we are at the Balquhidder Junction of the railway to Oban, standing lonely as if lost in the heart of the Highlands. The name seems misleading, for it is rather at the next halting-place southward, Kingshouse, that one turns off a couple of miles to Loch Voil and the Braes of Balquhidder, where Rob Roy rests at peace beneath a circle of chieftainly Bens, through which Glenfinlas would lead us to the Trossachs region.