The next day I reached the northern boundary of the Duke of Atholl’s estates, having walked for full forty miles continuously through it.  Passed over a very bleak, treeless, barren waste of mountain and moorland, most of it too rocky or soilless for even heather.  The dashing, flashing, little Garry, which I had followed for a day or two, thinned and narrowed down to a noisy brook as I ascended towards its source.  For a long distance the country was exceedingly wild and desolate.  Terrible must be the condition of a man benighted therein, especially in winter.  There were standing beacons all along the road for miles, to indicate the track when it was buried in drifting snow.  These were painted posts, about six or eight feet high, planted on the rocky, river side of the road, at a few rods interval, to guide the traveller and keep him from dashing over the concealed precipices.  About the middle of the afternoon I reached the summit of the two watersheds, where a horse’s hoof might so dam a balancing stream as to send it southward into the Tay or northward into the Moray Firth.  Soon a rivulet welled out in the latter direction with a decided current.  It was the Spey.  A few miles brought me suddenly into a little, glorious world of beauty.  The change of theatrical sceneries could hardly have produced a more sudden and striking contrast than this presented to the wild, cold, dark waste through which I had been travelling for a day.  It was Strathspey; and I doubt if there is another view in Scotland, of the same dimensions, to equal it.  It was indescribably grand and beautiful, if you could blend the meaning of these two commonly-coupled adjectives into one qualification, as you can blend two colors on the easel.  To get the full enjoyment of the scene at one draught, you should enter it first from the south, after having travelled for twenty miles without seeing a sheaf of wheat or patch of vegetation tilled by the hand of man.  I know nothing in America to compare it with or to help the American reader to an approximate idea of it.  Imagine a land-lake, apparently shut in completely by a circular wall of mountains of every stature, the tallest looking over the shoulders of the lower hills, like grand giants standing in steel helmets and green doublets and gilded corselets, to see the soft and quiet beauty of the valley sleeping under their watch and ward.  As the sun-bursts from the strath-skies above darted out of their shifting cloud-walls and flashed a flush of light upon the solemn brows of these majestic apostles of nature one by one, they stood haloed, like the favored saints in Scripture in the overflow of the Transfiguration.  It was just the kind of day to make the scene glorious indescribably.  The clouds and sky were in the happiest disposition for the brilliant plays and pictures of light and shade, and dissolving views of fascinating splendor succeeded and surpassed each other at a minute’s interval.  Now, the great land-lake, on whose bosom floated