348 REMINISCENCES OF A HUNTSMAN. 



sunshine; and, lifting her veil, smiles on admiring 

 man with an effulgent brow, the more beautiful in 

 that for a time it has been mysteriously concealed. 



Alas! that I should be forced to descend from 

 enraptured reminiscences of nature, to condemn the 

 errors of a builder, and to chronicle the faults of taste, 



to describe, in fact, the unpretending, unpoetical 



home of the Chief of the Camerons, of the LochieV, 

 the Highland proprietor lineally descended for eight 

 hundred years, whose heritance is marked by cen- 

 turies, and whose title-deed is a claymore. Alas! 

 that, in describing his mansion, 1 can only say that 

 the house, though a comfortable one, is stuck in a 

 hole; in those four words, I tell it all. So utterly 

 dead to the beauties of Nature and accessible gran- 

 deur of situation were those who built it, that they 

 have of a verity turned one of the chief features 

 of the surrounding site into an enemy instead of 

 a bounteous friend. A hole has been dug for the 

 house on the River Arkeg, which rushes by within ten 

 yards of its windows, till it falls into Loch Lochy; 

 the torrent and waterfall so near, that with a bad 

 view of it, it annoys with its noise, and in times of 

 flood inundates the offices, which, like those of a 

 house in London, are underground, and need nothing 

 but an iron railing and a stuffed representation of a 

 policeman looking down, either for love or duty, to 

 render their cockney ism complete. Still, unhappily 

 as the house is placed, much might be done to better 

 its prospect ; and I wonder that my old friend Lochiel 

 (we were in the Guards at the same time), in con- 

 junction with the good taste I know Lady Vere pos- 

 sesses, does not at least put the vicinity in order, and 

 minister to it in the spirit of his famed and loyal an- 



