248 LOCH CRERAN. 



" Who could have thought such glory lay concealed 

 Beneath thy beams, oh sun !" 



And yet what numbers of magnificent "night landscapes 

 there must be, " while you and I and all of us " fall 

 down, and wretched gaslight triumphs over us ! 



So thought we on the previous evening, as our boat 

 rippled through the darkening water under the daintily 

 copse-clad rocks, near Cregan Ferry, and we watched the 

 woods of Barcaldine in the growing evening haze. 

 " There are the three smokes all close together ! " some 

 one remarks ; and sure enough they are close enough 

 from here, and only a mile or two apart in reality. 

 What are the three smokes, you ask ! and how can they 

 be distinguished? Just look up there over all those 

 woods to the hillside above, and the clear grey smoke of 

 the wood fires streams dreamily over towards Glen 

 Salloch. Quite a poetical, hazy smoke, just such a 

 misty, ghostly enveloping of the habitation as might have 

 gathered over the Bower of Deirdre, by Etive shore. 

 There, again, in the centre of the woods, rises the harsh 

 black smoke of our higher civilization, gathered at the 

 cost of our lower civilization, that so painfully drags out 

 the bowels of the earth to toast the benumbed souls of a 

 thankless generation. It drifts across the pine tops to 

 the shoulders of Ben Breac like an underbred ghost that 

 thought it unnecessary to wash itself or purge its 

 neglected raiment. Down near the shore, again, with a 

 humble deferential air about it, hangs the skin of the 

 Benderloch soil, unwilling to rise too far above it. The 

 smoke of the dissipated turf has a homely blueish-brown 

 hue of comfort, and one feels as if it alone could be 

 reasonably called "reek," and allowed to cover the 



