such a
bed as a prince has seldom the good fortune to take his rest on; and if
the wanderer have a good conscience, and the night be fine, he will
sleep far more soundly than if he were packed on the floor of a bothy,
with ten Highlanders who every now and then are giving their shoulders
nervous jerks against the heather stumps, or scratching the very skin
off their wrists. When he awakens, he finds himself nearer to the top of
Ben Muich Dhui than he had probably supposed, and the ascent is straight
and simple. He may be there to see the sun rise, a sight which has its
own peculiar glories, though most people prefer seeing the event from
some solitary hill, which, like Ben Nevis, Shehallion, or the Righi,
stands alone, and looks round on a distant panorama of mountains.

To return to the Dee.--The river divides again, one stream coming
tumbling down through the cleft between Cairn Toul and Brae Riach,
called the Garchary Burn. The other, less precipitously inclined, comes
from between Brae Riach and Ben Mulch Dhul, and is called the Larig.
Like the Nile and the Niger, the Dee is a river of a disputed source. As
we shall presently find, the right of the Garchary to that distinction
is strongly maintained by pretty high authority; but we are ourselves
inclined to adopt the Larig, not only because it appeared to us to
contain a greater volume of water, but because it is more in the line of
the glen, and, though rough enough, is not so desperately flighty as the
Garchary, and does not join it in those great leaps which, however
surprising and worthy of admiration they may be in themselves, are not
quite consistent with the calm dignity of a river destined to pass close
to two universities. Following then the Larig over rocks and rough
stones, among which it chafes and foams, we reach a sort of barrier of
stones laid together by the hand of nature with the regularity of an
artificial breakwater. As we pass over this barrier, a hollow rumbling
is heard beneath; for the stream, at least at ordinary times, finds its
way in many rills deep down among the stones. When we reach the top of
the bank we are on the edge of a circular basin, abrupt and deep, but
full of water so exquisitely clear that the pebbly bottom is every where
visible. Here the various springs, passing by their own peculiar
conduit-pipes from the centre of the mountain, meet together, and east
up their waters into the round basin--one can see the surface disturb