284 REMINISCENCES OF A HUNTSMAN 



to chronicle the faults of taste to describe, in fact, the unpre- 

 tending, unpoetical home of the Chief of the Camerons, of the 

 Lochiel, the Highland proprietor lineally descended for eight 

 hundred years, whose heritance is marked by centuries, and 

 whose title-deed is a claymore. Alas ! that, in describing his 

 mansion, I 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 grandeur 

 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 

 conjunction with the good taste I know Lady Vere possesses, 

 does not at least put the vicinity in order, and minister to it in 

 the spirit of his famed and loyal ancestor Sir Ewen Cameron, 

 who, proud of the gifts of Nature, offered to bet that he would 

 shoot a stag and kill a salmon from the window of his tower, 

 on the banks of the Arkeg. At present a greenly painted iron 

 fence, put up at great cost, keeps the deer away from the 

 house, and wooden pales along the graceful and leaping river, if 

 Naiads really existed, would make them need every drop of 

 water from the fall to restore them from a fainting fit, the 

 effects of mortal enormity. What has the lawn of Lochiel to 

 do with flower-pots and flowers, or the entrance at his gate 

 with barns or wooden sheds ; or his grounds with little laurel 

 bushes, or his lands with fences? While Loch Lochy, Glen- 

 garry, Loch Quoich, Knoidart, and Cameron of Morar, 



