f official and other records
I was convinced. The problem was how to get at these and recast the
information in a digested and generally intelligible form.

The necessity for doing this was brought home to me with renewed force
by the fact that, when I left Dorlin, I was engaged to stay at
Ardverikie with Sir John Ramsden, who was the owner, by purchase, of
one of the greatest sporting territories in the Highlands, a large
portion of which he was then planting with timber. The first stage of my
journey from Dorlin was again Fort William, where I slept, and whence
next morning I proceeded by an old-fashioned stagecoach to my
destination, which lay midway between Fort William and Kingussie. We had
not gone far before I heard an English voice shouting something to the
passengers near in tones of great excitement. The speaker, with his
black frock coat, was, to judge from his appearance, a Nonconformist
English minister, who was vaguely pointing to the mountains on the left
side of the road; and at last I managed to catch a few words of his
oratory. They were in effect as follows: "What was there on those
mountains fifty years ago? Men were on those mountains then. What will
you find there now? Deer--nothing but deer." This sort of thing went on
for some time, till at last the coachman, a burly Highlander, turned
round on the orator and said: "I'm thinking you don't know what you're
talking about. In those mountains at which you're flourishing your hands
you won't find a deer all the way from Fort William to Kingussie." The
orator then, so far as I was able to understand, wandered away to the
question of landed property generally, and Acts of Parliament passed in
the reign of William and Mary. It seemed, however, that his audience
were not responsive, and he presently began descanting on the ignorance
of the Highland people and their need of more education. Here, again,
his eloquence was interrupted by the coachman. "Education," he
exclaimed. "What you call education I call the Highland rinderpest."
After this the orator was comparatively quiet.

Meanwhile the character of the surrounding landscape changed. We began
to see glimpses ahead of us of the waters of Loch Laggan. Presently the
loch, fringed with birch trees, was directly below the road. On the
opposite side were mountains descending to its silvery surface, some of
them bare, some green with larches, and upward from a wooded promontory
wreaths of smoke were rising