n8 LOCH CRERAN. 



instance, is a well-rooted birch-tree surrounded by 

 occasional exposed evergreens. Yet the latter have been 

 spared, while the leafless, widely rooted, small branched 

 birch has lifted its enormous foot almost as high as its 

 late summit. Individual opinions under such circum- 

 stances can be of little value, and observations over a 

 wide area are necessary to arrive at any conclusions. 

 Fortunately for the West Highlands, the tide was ebbing 

 ere the storm reached its height, or the record of disaster 

 would have far exceeded anything previously recorded. 

 As we are apparently threatened with other severe gales 

 at high spring tides, it behoves us all to be prepared for 

 them, and avoid as much as possible leaving removeable 

 property within their influence. In Loch Creran no one 

 living ever saw such a sea, the loch being one sheet of 

 spindrift, through which the squalls cut lanes in the 

 excess of their fury. But we are not, and have not been, 

 cold. No sooner does the traveller cross the snowy ridge 

 about Killin than he begins to enter a black land, sharply 

 defined from the white region he is leaving. The south- 

 west winds have warmed and blackened all the land up 

 to the hill-tops, save where this wet, warm season has 

 greened all the slopes with grass and sphagnum. As we 

 left the road this evening, and wandered off under the 

 lonely trees and around their fallen fellows, we could 

 scarcely credit our eyesight at the presence of multitudes 

 of delicate green trefoil leaves, strewn all among the 

 dingier but still cheerfully coloured mosses. Even in our 

 northern exposure, too, our friends hand us a beautiful 

 opening flower of rhododendron, and we naturally expect 

 animal life to be as plentiful with us as the vegetable. 

 In place of this, there never was such a scarcity of life at 

 this period of the year ; and except the multitudes of gulls 



