After three or four stoppages the _Chancellor_ began to get fairly into Loch Long. The hills on either side were not high, and were covered only with grass and heather; but they had, nevertheless, a certain quiet beauty. It seemed as if they made a world of their own, and as if they were contemptuously indifferent to the foolish beings who came among them for an hour in their impudent, puffing steamer, and were gone like a cloud. Right in front was one bold eminence, perhaps a thousand or twelve hundred feet high, which divided the waters of the upper part of Loch Long from those of Loch Goil on the west. Gazing at its weather-beaten rocks and its sketches of silent moorland, one could hardly help tasting that renovating draught--the sense that one has reached a place where man is as nothing, a sphere which is but nominally under his sway, where he comes and goes, but leaves behind him no mark upon the face of nature. Leaving this eminence upon the left, the channel became narrower, and the inlet seemed to be completely land-locked. In front the nearer hills seemed to lie one behind another, fold upon fold, while beyond some much loftier peaks raised their blue summits to heaven. Alec Lindsay never tired of gazing on them. If he turned away his eyes, it was that he might refresh them with a change of scene--the low green rock, the salt water washing the white stones under the heather on the hillside, the tiny rainbow in the foam of the paddle-wheels--and return with new desire to the sight of the everlasting hills. Strange, he thought to himself, as he gazed on the shadow of a cloud passing like a spirit over a lonely peak--strange that the sight of masses of mere dead earth and stone, the dullest and lowest forms of matter, should be able to touch us more profoundly than all the lovely sights and sweet sounds of the animated world! In a few miles the top of the loch was reached. The mountains, standing like giants ‘to sentinel enchanted land,’ rose almost from the water’s edge. A few cottages stood clustering together at the mouth of a defile which gave access to Loch Lomond on the east. One or two large houses (of which ‘Glendhu,’ Mr. James Lindsay’s seaside residence, was one) stood at intervals along the shore. Alec’s first care after landing was to provide himself with a lodging, as (much to his satisfaction) he was not required to live in Mr. Fraser’s house; and he was fortunate enough to find the accommodation he wanted in a cottage close to the seashore. In the afternoon he called on Mrs. Fraser, and found her a fat, florid, good-natured looking woman, ostentatiously dressed, and surrounded by a troop of her progeny.