THE GREAT STAG OF COKRTE VORTGIIT. 357 



Strange, mysteriously magnificent to my mind, that 

 holy symbol on the brow of Ben Nevis assuredly is; 

 unassailed by rain, and indissoluble by the sun, it is, 

 even in surrounding snows, for ever confessed, and 

 so strangely true, that the wondering eye can trace 

 in its unsullied hues the lines of an extended figure. 

 In winter whiter in its whiteness, and in summer 

 still more purely cold and exact, when all surrounding 

 vegetation starts to life. 



Our path wound for a long distance through 

 scanty birch trees, and along a precipitous side of a 

 rocky burn into which one slip of our sure-footed 

 ponies would have sent us, never more to Inmt 

 the mountain deer ; but, no such accident happening, 

 we crested the range of hill, one side of which 

 forms the forest, and, having walked and ridden, we 

 attained the short down-like grass or moss which 

 carpets the brow of Ben Vain, and saw the wire fence 

 put up by Lord Malmsbury to protect that part of 

 the forest from the intrusion of sheep. John Stuart, 

 the head forester, here left us, and, kneeling down at 

 a beautiful spring which crests the very summit of 

 the mountain, never dry in summer nor frozen in 

 winter, began unceremoniously to lose time, gathering 

 and eating the curious little cress that grows on the 

 margin of the spring. Stuart, I found, had been 

 assured by a Highland Esculapius that, " as long as 

 he could daily eat this cress, he would never die." 

 The doctor was, in my opinion, a wag, because none 

 but a man possessed of such limbs, activity, and 

 stoutness as Stuart boasts, could attain to that spring 

 every day ; tlierefore, if he had strength to reach the 

 site of the spring, little, save some accidental or 

 violent means, could have put him from the world. 



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