254 LOCH CRERAN. 



man meant to represent ? A portly alderman with a 

 resplendent white waistcoat and napkin devouring a 

 large ice-cream ! Alas ! what a degrading comparison, 

 when this might be the gate into the Nevada silver land 

 or the diamond mines of Golconda. A fringe of brown 

 leaves on the young oaks up among " the gods," and 

 scanty discoloured napkins here and there waving 

 hurrahs for the opening scene from the side galleries 

 occupied by the copsewood, represents the audience. 



Where is the genius of the still-life picture ? is there 

 really nothing else animate around to move the scenery ? 



A pair of mild eyes look down upon us from the slope 

 above, and a lamb browsing on the scanty herbage must 

 be the transformed Fairy Queen. Our eyes turn half 

 sadly to the dead tree lying, with its roots in the pool 

 and its poor head buried in the mossy bank where the 

 last winter had tossed it from the summit, when the clip 

 of a wing catches our eyes and a blackie skips over the 

 bank above, only to disappear in a moment with another 

 flick when it finds a strange intruder on the scene. By- 

 and-by a " tweet, tweet " directs us towards a flock of 

 coletits, restlessly busy among the mosses, hunting for 

 insects with the most preternatural rapidity ; but they 

 too pass rapidly on and leave us alone, when we re- 

 collect that the scene-shifters may be kept waiting, and 

 we slip quietly back again into the outer world, where 

 we can peep through tree stems to the quiet loch and 

 the snow-clad hills on the one hand, and the white-crusted 

 mosses on the other, like the curly fleeces of whitefaced 

 sheep. 



Down by the shore the high tides have left our long 

 foreshores black, that during the neaps were covered 

 with plates of crackling ice. As the tide rose to the 



