hristmas toy.
The waters have assumed that hard burnished metallic appearance which
they convey to the eye raised far above them in a hot summer day. The
far-stretching moss, with one or two ghastly white stones standing erect
out of its blackness like druidical remains, carries the eye along its
surface to the dusky and mysterious ruins of Inverlochy Castle, which
has so sadly puzzled antiquaries to divine how its princely round towers
and broad barbican could have been erected in that wild and remote
region, where they stand patiently in their ruined grandeur, waiting
till our friend Billings shall, with his incomparable pencil, make each
tower and arch and moulding as familiar to the public eye as if the old
ruin stood in Fleet Street.

Off we start with the lake to the left, taking care to keep the level we
have gained. A short interval of walking in a horizontal direction, and
again we must begin to climb. On this side the porphyry dome is round
and comparatively smooth--scarcely so abrupt as the outer range of hill
which we have just ascended. But wending north-eastwardly when near the
summit, we came suddenly to a spot where a huge fragment of the dome
had, as it were, been broken off, leaving a ghastly rent--how deep it
were difficult for the eye to fix, but the usual authorities tell us
that the precipices here are 1500 feet high. When we reached their edge,
we found that the clouds, which had been completely lifted up from the
smoother parts of the mountain, still lingered as if they had difficulty
in getting clear of the ragged edges of the cavernous opening, and
moving about restlessly like evil spirits, hither and thither, afforded
but partial glimpses of the deep vale below. Though Ben Nevis was at
this time rather deficient in his snowy honours, considerable patches
lay in the unsunned crevices of the precipice. It was a fine thing to
occupy one's-self in tilting over huge boulders, and to see them
gradually approach the edge of the gulf, and then leap thundering into
the mist.

Turning our eyes from the terrible fascinations of the precipice to the
apex of the hill now in full view, a strange sight there met our eyes--a
sight so strange that we venture to say the reader no more anticipates
it than we did, at the moment when we looked from the yawning precipice
to what we expected to be a solitary mountain-top. "Pooh!" the reader
will say, "it was an eagle looking at the sun, or a red-deer snuffing
with