301 FIELD AND FERN. 



that they " made Cheddar, and tried to make Stil- 

 ton/' A chapel with a graveyard on a dark fir 

 knoll gave birth to another query, and we were told 

 in still darker speech : " It's no Hob Roy, it's Mac 

 Gregor that's stopping there." Farther on there is 

 the ivied shell of an old church, which still denies its 

 successor the seisin of the bell; while the forth- 

 coming meeting of the parochial board is nailed on 

 an ash hard by. One stone has no symbol save a 

 horse-shoe; and a half-broken slab, with a broad 

 sword rudely carved, marks the grave of one whom 

 we must now try to regard in the tenderer light of 

 an eminent cattle dealer. There are historic doubts 

 as to whether Rob's deeds were equal to his fame ; 

 but his voice, at all events, as it echoed across Loch 

 Voil, rivalled in its volume that Greenwich inn- 

 keeper's, to whom Richardson the showman left 

 el,000 " because he was such a bould speaker/' and 

 " could be heerd all over the fear." We still see on 

 the other side of the loch the thatched cottage in 

 which his mother died. That strange chasm in the 

 rock summit still seems to open and shut as it did 

 beneath his gaze ; but many a freezing east wind has 

 blown since then, and the heather and the bleaber- 

 ries have all gone from the braes of Balquhidder. 

 A few deer pass with the storm from the Black and 

 Glenartney Forests, but the blackfaces have the hills 

 pretty nearly to themselves, and the brindled Dun- 

 can wanders by the side of the loch "just as canny 

 as a horse/' with a dozen of his calves, and cows and 



