in the prose world, come here gliding in boats, or borne over the hills. Up the side of the loch gleams a line of cottages, here and there bursting into loftier gables or attic windows, appearing from behind high hedges, from within gardens, behind rows of potatoes or clusters of trees. Every house has its boat deposited on the beach: the aborigines, of every rank, sex, and description, are skilful in the management of these indispensable conveyances. The ladies, the very babies row. I saw a creature of four manage his boat as if it were the natural shell of that species of amphibi. The phenomenon amused me greatly. It was burned brown with the sunshine of the early summer, and damped throughout with the succeeding rain. I doubt if its feet or its petticoats were ever dry. There it sat in its boat, and prospered. Probably it will fall heir to its grandfather's rheumatism before it grows half as old a man.

"It is a curious fact," said the Archdeacon, coming suddenly in among us, as he did five or six times in the morning, making a little rapid excursion from his work, and back again, after he had discharged his arrow-"it is a curious fact that all the native inhabitants of Knocktarlitie the aborigines, in fact—are old ladies. I have just been calculating that, in the course of a few years, chances of immigration excepted, the race must be extinct."

The sudden outcry which this speech raised among us three ladies may be imagined. "Archdeacon!" exclaimed his wife. It was all she could say. The idea of entire depopulation falling upon the pleasant banks of the Gare Loch, and all this beauty returning to the wilderness, was too afflicting to be lightly discussed.

"The Archdeacon is only ironical," said I; "and, besides, he means the upper classes: gentlemen always are so hard upon us. Perhaps we ought to take ourselves out of the world altogether when we grow old, and keep out of other people's way."

"When you grow old, Miss Arabella," said the Archdeacon, with his finest bow, "I will allow you to consider the question; but, in the mean time, here's the fact; curious, isn't it? It struck me as quite a new branch of statistical inquiry. Given such a class of population, how it keeps itself up?"

"It is a class of population that affects such places,' said Kate. “I'll tell you how it keeps itself up, Archdeacon. How does Chelsea Hospital keep itself up? I suspect if there were no battles going on anywhere, the old Peninsula men would soon be extinct, wouldn't they? How easily you talk of your old ladies! Aren't they the survivors, the wounded, of the outside fight? Don't be afraid, the race will never be extinct."

"Mrs S, I stand reproved," said the Archdeacon. "Notwithstanding, you know it is remarkable.

Why are there no young people among them ?-that is the question. No daughters, nor nieces even, and as for sonsThe Archdeacon threw up his hands as if that were entirely out of the question.

"My dear, we have no children ourselves," said Mrs Archdeacon, very mildly. Upon which he looked at her, spun round upon his heel, and with his sharp light step was gone out of the room before any one could say another word. It was the Archdeacon's way. Something came into his head when he was at his work that wanted utterance. He came, fired it among us, and disappeared again. He did this, as I have mentioned, half-a-dozen times in one day.

"It is curious though, as the Archdeacon says, how old ladies do settle in one place, and keep it up from generation to generation," said Mrs Archdeacon, "with their tea-parties. They give tea-parties here, do you know. We have been to two or three, but it's fatiguing work. You sit down round a long table, and have every kind of cake offered to you. It's very odd. I

confess I like a mixture of all ages, for my part."

"And look here-here's a mixture of ages," said Kate.

It was a party of people coming to call-blessed visitants-in the rain! Some charming young friends of ours were among them. Mr Reginald, our kind young companion of former times, led the party, in beatific circumstances, surrounded by a halo of young ladies. I need not, however, enter into a description of this pretty group, as it is foreign to the immediate tenor of my tale. Possible romances gleaming through a pleasant mist of flirtation gave a sweet suggestiveness to the scene. Ah, youth, youth! always the same, though the actors in the drama change perpetually. But it is hard to think that these pretty creatures are to fold their wings in the inevitable course of nature, and drop down into sober elderly souls like dear Kate and me.

To look at them now, when the sun shines, philandering, as Kate says, down that pretty old avenue! The avenue itself is one of the glories of Knocktarlitie; yew-trees not to be surpassed, in solemn majestic lines of sombre foliage and brown branching - not crowded close as in an Italian alley, with the blazing sun shut out, a monastic twilight strait between two glowing worlds of day; but standing apart like English trees, having bars of sunshine and a whole universe of air and light breathing visible around those sombre-splendid arches which absorb and yet repel the sun. Outside the yews, two glorious lines of limes stand meditative over them, watching through those breaks of light the pretty figures gleaming past, the puffs of airy muslin and silken reflections of drapery. Solemn and abstract stand the yewtrees, immemorial spectators, lost in the observant calm of age, but the lime branches thrill with a sympathetic tremor as summer and youth go gleaming by. We come after, staid and serious, not

Do

saying much; we two women, solitary, not any longer young. you imagine we have not thoughts of our own as we follow the young people through the airy lights and dropping shadows? I too, though nobody knows it, have such trees still growing, and such sunshine shining in the silent world of memory that belongs to me. Figures glide through those vistas which human sight beholds no longer. Ah, me! what human vision of today could identify the Arabella yonder, moving in a glorified surrounding of love and youth and sweet observance, with the Arabella here? But the two are the same to me. I can hear those voices whisper which have lost the faculty of mortal speech. The present is flitting by moment after moment. It is an evanescent glory even to these reigning princesses and princes before us: but the past is for ever. Why we should be sad about it I cannot tell. While it was doing, it was doubtful, transitory, crossed with clouds and suspicions, and a hundred pangs of uncertainty. Now it is perfect, sublimest suggestion of grammatical science. Perhaps it is because human faculties are so unused to perfection that we all think it sad. And I suspect one advantage of entering into the vulgar strain of life-marrying, in short-is, that one is let down more gradually and easily out of one's youth, and learns that one is not young, and that a different order of things has commenced, without any pang, but only with a natural revolution of thought. This, however, is an unprofitable subject of inquiry, especially as my subject is Knocktarlitie, and not the regretful musings of a declining life.

"The picturesque is dying out everywhere," said the Archdeacon, stretching himself out on the heather (but of course with a plaid between). "The picturesque of language as well as of costume, and all other external graces. Talk, like dress, flattens into a universal

fashion. When I was at Knocktarlitie long ago-not so very long either just before the present era of civilisation set in-the Glasgow folks used to come down here to the saut water. The saut water! Was there ever a more felicitous expression? Fancy how the briny wave must have flashed and danced and foamed to the civic imagination! Now that spell is broken. Look at those tufts of villas all over the side of the loch. The people nowadays bring their families down to the coast; whereas it is no more the coast than the Broomielaw is, and bears no resemblance, nestling up here among a thousand folds of hills, to the wild external edge of the island, with an ocean foaming on its rocks. But oh for the fresh days of the saut water! when a man made himself wretched for nature's sake with the best grace in the world, and slept in a boxbed, and scrambled for a living. I came down in the train from Glasgow the other day with a collection of men going home to dinner. Not a lofty style of physiognomy, I am bound to say; but to hear how they chattered over their Glasgow papers about cottages, and palaces, and who was living where! The coast, as they called it, was only a repetition of their crescents and terraces. They give the same dinners, I daresay, and talk the same stuff as usual. What is the good of leaving home under such circumstances? Convenience has swallowed up life."

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My dear, it must be very good for their health," said Mrs Archdeacon, mildly.

"And who on earth cares for their health?" cried the Archdeacon, kicking away a basket which John had just emptied. "A man who comes to such a scene as this in cold-blooded consideration for his appetite, deserves to be kicked out of it again summarily. Speaking of appetite, where's the luncheon? Here's that fellow John been left as usual to his own devices. Of course, he's fixed on a place where there's no view."

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No, dear uncle," said pretty Alice, demurely, “Mr A- and I have just been choosing the spot, and there's the loveliest view."

"The loveliest view!" echoed young Mr Reginald, who was just behind her, and was not looking at the loch at all, so far as I could see.

The Archdeacon looked at them both with a twinkle in his eye. "Ah, ah! I perceive," said the dear good man, and jumped up and held out his hand to me to help me up the hill. "Young people fortunately are untouched by the vulgarising influences of civilisation, Miss Arabella," said the Archdeacon; "they are just as great fools as they used to be in old days. Don't you think so? Let us go and look at this view. I rather object to all the chateaux and cottages of the Glasgow people; but that big house, with its square tower standing out in a sort of vulgar suzerainship over the whole, is not so bad either in point of effect. In my day there was but a thatched house dropped here and there, and all the fresh freedom of the hillside unbroken."

"But look here, Archdeacon," cried I, directing him to the other hand.

He looked, and, I am bound to add, was silent. There nothing was to be said. We were gazing straight into the marvellous inequalities of the hills; and the broken banks before us, as they folded over each other, opened here and there to a gleam of silent water, just touched into light at one corner by the white sail of a tiny yacht. Sound was not in that silent splendid landscape. Immediately before us, the first of that banded brotherhood of hills stood out calm into the water, silently emphasising the spot where nature, out of her boundless liberality, had sent forth Loch Goil out of Loch Long. In the distance, up the opening cleft of the smaller loch, appeared the glimmer of a yellow corn-field upon the water-side, and the dark ruin of Carrick Castle, lonely and voiceless.

Above, the sun was shining fitfully, and a hundred shadows flying over those speechless, eloquent mountains; and yonder, on the other hand, was the sweet Gare-Loch, all inhabited and kindly, with houses gleaming out from the wooded slopes, and boats upon the familiar water, and coy headlands stretching out as if to embrace each other, but kept apart by the current which sweeps into the Clyde and the world. I could not talk on that mount of vision; and even the Archdeacon drew a long breath and was silent. The landscape was perfect, a dramatic-suggestive scene— the mysteries of nature, on one hand, straying deep into the bosom of the hills, and the far-off world, on the other, toiling on, without a pause, yet not unsusceptible to the sweet holiday of the hills and the sky.

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Well, well," said the Archdeacon, with a sigh, and a sort of deprecating gesture, lifting his hands towards the hills" but we must have lunch, my dear Miss Arabella; lunch must be eaten all the same."

And the truth was, we did eat lunch as if that were the object of existence, and all the glorious scenery around us was quite a secondary consideration; notwithstanding that, of course, we had come all the distance for no other object than the view. I confess that I gazed aside now and then from the laughter and talk, and felt the calm silence of the hills strike upon me like a reproach. Insignificant creatures of a day, what were we, to make all this gabble in the everlasting silence ? Serious conversation, enlivened with the sweet sympathies of friendship, would have been congenial to the scene; but that, which is difficult to be had anywhere, was of course impossible in such a mixed party. Mr Reginald, whom I know to be capable of better things, was, it may be supposed, devoting himself to pretty Alice, the Archdeacon's niece (in whom I cannot say that I see much, for my own part, though, as every

body says she is very pretty, I presume it must be true; but as for conversation, that, to be sure, is not to be expected from a girl of twenty); and Kate, whose own experience of life might have been supposed to give her more serious views of such matters, lost no opportunity of directing the attention of the company to the two young people, and making absurd remarks, accompanied by eclats of laughterI must say, profoundly unsuitable to the scene; while Mrs Archdeacon's quiet attention to the luncheon, and her anxiety that her husband should have nothing which should disagree with him, and the Archdeacon's own divided mind, one while giving his countenance to dear Kate's nonsense, and the other lost in consideration of the delicacies of his own stomach, which exacted an amount of care altogether beyond the due claims of such a vulgar though important agency, made our meal, though eaten amid all the sweetest influences of nature, by no means such a feast of reason as it might have been. I alone, withdrawing myself a little by times from the others, gave my special attention to the landscape, which, on every side, wherever you could turn, was equally lovely. Since I have been in Scotland this year, it has been my fortune to occupy myself principally with the lochs of that beautiful country, and here, at one glance, was a mystical circle of three, all gleaming under the fitful Highland sunshine. it was only by moments that I could really turn my thoughts, with my eyes, to the soft bays of the Gare Loch, on one hand, shining like an Italian lake, or to the solemn silent gleam of Loch Long penetrating among its hills, and the opening reach of Loch Goil on the other. The distraction of so many sounds close at hand, the little byplay of Reginald and Alice (which, however one might disapprove of its absurdity, attracted one's observation), the laughter and nonsense of dear Kate, who really does not

But

show that gravity which might be expected from her-even the puzzled, impatient looks of the Archdeacon, considering whether to eat or not to eat, and his wife's conjugal advices to him on the subject, all combined to fret and wear out that attention which I would gladly have bestowed on the magic scene around. Oh human nature! here we were among the broken slopes that intervene between lake and hill, with our white tablecloth laid out over the rustling heather and sweet bog-myrtle, and our little group detached in mortal complacency of self-importance from all the silent splendour of the landscape, absorbed in ourselves, our flirtations, our jests, our dyspeptics. To an intelligent observer the scene would have been impressive; but I

doubt much whether any one but myself took note of the sweet universal harmony around, and the jarring but interesting chord of humanity, struck upon a totally different key, which gave a point and centre to the scene.

That was our last experience at Knocktarlitie. I might give other sketches at great length; but as there were other lochs to be visited, I refrain from describing our many pleasant water-excursions, and all the other charms of that Arcadian retirement. And only adding, Farewell, thou sweet peninsula! farewell, ye gentle hills and friends! leave the record to dear Kate, who chooses, I cannot tell why, the scene most sacred to sentiment and poetry, for her portion of our mutual task. ARABELLA W

The reason why I choose what Arabella, poor thing! calls "the scene most sacred to sentiment and poetry," is because there are some things very unpoetic and unsentimental in it, which will be quite in my way. And I do not hesitate, for this reason, to go over the ground which everybody has gone over before. Arabella and I are very old friends. We were not girls together, it is true; but we have lived near, and seen a great deal of each other, for many years; and she and I can afford to speak with a little freedom, and are above quarrelling. It will be perceived that her spirits are not so great as in our last excursion. I assign no reason for it; I only indicate the fact. The Archdeacon's company, and that of his nice wife and his pretty niece, changes the character of our party altogether. It is much more rational in some respects, and less piquant in others; and as I trust it may be the beginning of a series of expeditions, I welcome the change, and find it very much to my mind. We are giving all our attention to the lochs, as Arabella mentions. It

may be the Cumberland lakes next year, or the Swiss lakes, or the Italian. I think the prospect a famous one, though sincerely I doubt whether any of them could be finer than the lochs of Scotland, from which we have just returned.

We set out upon Loch Lomond a party of six, with a little individual in addition, who would have disgusted any sentimental tourist, but who became quite the hero of the day with some of us. The personnel of the group is worthy a word in passing. The Archdeacon himself comes out naturally in the foreground-he has tawny leonine looks and a portly presence; but, notwithstanding his weight, spurns the earth with a step as light and springy as if he were only twenty; and notwithstanding the sudden disgusts he sometimes takes at table, and uncertainties in the way of eating, looks, I am bound to say, as healthy and hearty as his best friends could desire. His wife beside him is everything an archdeacon's wife should be: suave and bland to the inferior clergy-kind to everybody;