ACHNACARRY FOREST 291 



his subject mountains, Ben Nevis reared his monarch brow, 

 croOTied with a diadem of snow, and bearing to heaven that 

 mysteriously awful sign of the cross by which he is known to 

 the eyes of strangers ; the cross that, tliougli on the mountain 

 only traced in snow, is impervious to the beams of the summer 

 sun ; and reigns through summer and winter, a living imperish- 

 able emblem of that which in the lighter as well as the heavier 

 hour, man would do well never to forget. Strange, mysteriously 

 magnificent to my mind, that holy symbol on the brow of Ben 

 Nevis assm-edly is ; unassailed by rain, and indissoluble by the 

 sun, it is, even in surroimding 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 sunnner still more pm-ely 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 hunt 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 

 gi-ass 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 ; therefore, 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. Stuart, having refreshed himself and guarded 



