28 ON THE GRAMPIAN HILLS. 



Immediately opposite is the " Glas-Mille," a high, 

 austere range of highland. Seen on a day such as 

 that on which I viewed them a day when sunshine 

 and shade followed in rapid succession I noted the 

 various hues that the mountainsides assumed, dark 

 brown now, light green next, sombre patches of blue- 

 black, yellowish- green, and finally a " deeply, darkly, 

 beautifully blue " tint were the prevailing colours 

 that lighted up the landscape. Close at hand was 

 the grim, gray, barren cairn, the Gaelic name of which 

 I think I had better not attempt to give, but which 

 being interpreted means the Aged Cairn an expres- 

 sion that graphically describes this fine hill. 



Far, far away I note amidst the cloud-clothed 

 mountain-tops two or three patches of snow, distinctly 

 visible even at the long distance. On one of the 

 adjacent hills I observed two insignificant-looking 

 lochs, which, however, have made their mark down 

 the mountainside, wearing away the ground in their 

 hasty passage towards the valley below, when swollen 

 by the winter's snows and rapid thaws. 



Having, as I sat upon a heap of stones, at the 

 highest point on which was a dilapidated pole, which 

 evidently at some time or other had been used as 

 a flag-staff, deliberately surveyed the glorious prospect 

 around me, I prepared to descend the steep side of 

 Cairnwall, in order to join my companion. " Facilis 

 descensus averni," I think, was an observation made 

 by some classic authority in one of the books which I 

 was compelled unwillingly to study in the very far-off 

 days of my youth. Doubtless that extremely down- 

 ward journey to that place was easy enough, but my 

 passage from the region above to the moorland below 



