ve a month in this hut at the
head of Glenevis. Go at dawn among the cliffs of yonder pine-forest, and
wait there till night hangs her moon-lamp in heaven. Commune with your
own soul, and be still. Let the images of departed years rise,
phantom-like, of their own awful accord from the darkness of your
memory, and pass away into the wood-gloom or the mountain-mist. Will
conscience dread such spectres? Will you quake before them, and bow down
your head on the mossy root of some old oak, and sob in the stern
silence of the haunted place? Thoughts, feelings, passions, spectral
deeds, will come rushing around your lair, as with the sound of the
wings of innumerous birds--ay, many of them, like birds of prey, to gnaw
your very heart. How many duties undischarged! How many opportunities
neglected! How many pleasures devoured! How many sins hugged! How many
wickednesses perpetrated! The desert looks more grim--the heaven
lowers--and the sun, like God's own eye, stares in upon your conscience!

But such is not the solitude of our beautiful young shepherd-girl of the
Hut of the Three Torrents. Her soul is as clear, as calm as the pool
pictured at times by the floating clouds that let fall their shadows
through among the overhanging birch-trees. What harm could she ever do?
What harm could she ever think? She may have wept--for there is sorrow
without sin; may have wept even at her prayers--for there is penitence
free from guilt, and innocence itself often kneels in contrition. Down
the long glen she accompanies the stream to the house of God--sings her
psalms--and returns wearied to her heather-bed. She is, indeed, a
solitary child; the eagle, and the raven, and the red-deer see that she
is so--and echo knows it when from her airy cliff she repeats the happy
creature's song. Her world is within this one glen. In this one glen she
may live all her days--be wooed, won, wedded, buried. Buried--said we?
Oh, why think of burial when gazing on that resplendent head?
Interminable tracts of the shining day await her, the lonely darling of
nature; nor dare Time ever eclipse the lustre of those wild-beaming
eyes! Her beauty shall be immortal, like that of her country's fairies.
So, Flower of the Wilderness, we wave towards thee a joyful--though an
everlasting farewell.

Where are we now? There is not on this round green earth a lovelier Loch
than Achray. About a mile above Loch Vennachar, and as we approach the
Brigg of Turk, we arrive at