1 8 TRANSACTIONS-PERTHSHIRE SOCIETY OF NATURAL SCIENCE. 
were frozen over, and their channels choked with drifted snow, and 
even the waterfalls were so completely masked by masses of green 
ice and long icicles that they seemed frozen solid to the rocks, but 
a soft gurgling sound which came up from under the snow told of 
water still flowing behind the folds of these icy curtains. In strange 
contrast to this wintry aspect the sun shone with intense heat, and 
the grouse sat out on the summits of the knolls rejoicing in its 
genial warmth. 
The first part of our walk was over rough, broken ground, clothed 
with heather and dotted over with alders and birch trees. The hill 
then rose abruptly in steep, grassy slopes, with the bare rock pro¬ 
truding through the scanty soil in great perpendicular masses, and 
in long irregular lines; the summit was crowned by a ridge of pre¬ 
cipitous crags, where secure and undisturbed the Ravens have had 
their abode for untold years. We soon heard the well-known croak 
of warning, and through our glasses spied one of the birds—a black 
speck—on a sharp pinnacle of rock near the nest, from which favourite 
position he had been watching our movements from afar. By the 
time we had reached the foot of the crags both birds were on the 
wing, and showed their annoyance at our presence by their constant 
barking cry, varied sometimes by a deep-toned croak, which was 
uttered when they alighted on the rocks, and tore up the ground 
with their strong beaks. 
It is a wild place this home of the Ravens, and we clambered 
with difficulty over the steep ground strewn with huge boulders, and 
gigantic fragments of rocks lying in chaotic confusion, one upon 
another, as they have fallen in successive ages from their places in 
the storm-splintered cliffs which towered above us. A ptarmigan’s 
feather among the stones and the track of a fox on a snow-drift were 
silent witnesses of its solitude, but all sense of loneliness was dis¬ 
pelled as, with our backs to the crags, we gazed on the glorious and 
extensive view spread out before us. The snow, which had only 
powdered the brown, shaggy shoulders of the hills, lay thick on their 
summits, and far away to the distant horizon peak beyond peak of 
mountains overlapping one another stood out radiant in their robes 
of pure glistening white. 
Far down below lay the loch, so calm and still, reflecting so 
exactly every tone and colour, every tree and stone of the mountain 
above, that it might have escaped notice but for the moving lines of 
silver, like cracks in a mirror, which the coots and other wild fowl 
made as they swam on the surface of the water. Shepherds and 
keepers were burning heather on the moors, and thin columns of 
smoke rose curling steadily upwards in the still air. There was no 
sound but the drip of water, the occasional croak of the Ravens, and 
