was that
of the prevailing schistose gneiss of the Scotch Highlands, in which
rounded confluent hills stand up over long-withdrawing valleys, and
imposing rather from its bare and lonely expansiveness, than from aught
bold or striking in its features. The district had been opened up only a
few seasons previous by the Parliamentary road over which we travelled,
and was at that time little known to the tourist; and the thirty years
which have since passed have in some respects considerably changed it,
as they have done the Highlands generally. Most of the cottages, when I
last journeyed the way, were represented by but broken ruins, and the
fields by mossy patches that remained green amid the waste. I marked at
one spot an extraordinary group of oak-trees, in the last stage of
decay, which would have attracted notice from their great bulk and size
in even the forests of England. The largest of the group lay rotting
upon the ground--a black, doddered shell, fully six feet in diameter,
but hollow as a tar-barrel; while the others, some four or five in
number, stood up around it, totally divested of all their larger boughs,
but green with leaves, that, from the minuteness of the twigs on which
they grew, wrapped them around like close-fitting mantles. Their period
of "tree-ship"--to borrow a phrase from Cowper--must have extended far
into the obscure past of Highland history--to a time, I doubt not, when
not a few of the adjacent peat mosses still lived as forests, and when
some of the neighbouring clans--Frasers, Bissets, and Chisholms--had, at
least under the existing names (French and Saxon in their derivation),
not yet begun to be. Ere we reached the solitary inn of
Auchen-nasheen--a true Highland clachan of the ancient type, the night
had fallen dark and stormy for a night in June; and a grey mist which
had been descending for hours along the hills--blotting off their brown
summits bit by bit, as an artist might his pencilled hills with a piece
of India rubber, but which, methodical in its encroachments, had
preserved in its advances a perfect horizontality of line--had broken
into a heavy, continuous rain. As, however, the fair weather had lasted
us till we were within a mile of our journey's end, we were only
partially wet on our arrival, and soon succeeded in drying ourselves in
front of a noble turf fire. My comrade would fain have solaced himself,
after our weary journey, with something nice. He held that a Highland