Walter Scott and his metrical and prose romances have changed all that. A stream of tourists flows steadily through the passes all the summer and autumn, and more fitfully at other seasons; and steamers, stage-coaches, and hotels have strangely altered the aspect of this "Scottish Lake Country." But the "everlasting hills" look down on it unchanged. The crest of Ben Lomond still dominates the western end of Loch Katrine, girt in by hillsides, or opening into glens as stern and almost as solitary as when they echoed back the slogan of Roderick Dhu. Round the lower extremity of the lake the mountains take closer rank and more varied forms; and the broken and impending precipices, the winding and opening waters, the wooded shores and islands, fringed with grey rock or "silver strand," seem, as when Fitz-James first set his foot here, an "enchanted land" over which Ben Venue and Ben An stand sentinels:-- "High on the south huge Ben Venue Down on the lake in masses threw Crags, knolls, and mounds confusedly hurled, The fragments of an earlier world; A wildering forest feathered o'er His ruined sides and summit hoar; While on the north through middle air Ben An lifts up his forehead bare." [Illustration: THE TROSSACHS AND BEN VENUE.] On the cloven side of Ben Venue is the "Coir-nan-Uriskin"--the Goblin's Cave or Hollow--deserted of its unearthly denizens since it has become an object of interest to the tourist. "Ellen's Isle," clad with wood to the water's edge, seems to shelter in the shadow of the northern shore. Cromwell's men, clambering up the pass, found that the women and children of the clan had sought refuge here; and one bold soldier swam out to the island to bring away a boat. Hardly had he touched ground when a woman--Helen Stuart--drew a dagger from below her apron and slew him. A minstrel's music has slightly changed the name and wholly changed the associations, and the spot is dedicated to another Ellen and to the gentler fancies, not the rude facts, of the days of old. From the "Silver Strand" opposite Ellen's Isle you wind for a couple of miles through the "bristled territory" of the Trossachs before you reach Loch Achray, and "the copse-wood grey that waves and weeps" above the second of the chain of lakes. Ben An and Ben Venue hold the place of sentries to left and to right, and seem to have tumbled down into the narrow pass huge fragments from their splintered sides, to block the way against intruders into this old sanctuary of the Gael. In vain; their very efforts have but added to the wild impressiveness of the scene, and to the crowds that come to wonder and admire. It would be "to gild refinèd gold" to describe the beauties of the Trossachs--the scene where Nature seems to have tried to produce, within the narrowest compass, the most bewildering effects by mingling her materials of rock and foliage and falling waters. Their praises have been sung in words that linger in every memory.