“I have seen to-day,” I said, “the loveliest scenery I ever met with; but we’ve got grand canons in America where you could put the whole of that scenery without crowding, and where it wouldn’t be much noticed by spectators, so busy would they be gazing at the surrounding wonders.”

“Fancy!” said she.

“I don’t want to say anything,” said I, “against what I have seen to-day, and I don’t want to think of anything else while I am looking at it; but this I will say, that landscape with Scott is very different from landscape without him.”

“That is very true, isn’t it?” said she; and then she stopped making comparisons, and I looked out of the window.

Oban is a very pretty place on the coast, but we never should have gone there if it had not been the place to start from for Staffa and Iona.  When I was only a girl I saw pictures of Fingal’s Cave, and I have read a good deal about it since, and it is one of the spots in the world that I have been longing to see, but I feel like crying when I tell you, madam, that the next morning there was such a storm that the boat for Staffa didn’t even start; and as the people told us that the storm would most likely last two or three days, and that the sea for a few days more would be so rough that Staffa would be out of the question, we had to give it up, and I was obliged to fall back from the reality to my imagination.  Jone tried to comfort me by telling me that he would be willing to bet ten to one that my fancy would soar a mile above the real thing, and that perhaps it was very well I didn’t see old Fingal’s Cave and so be disappointed.

“Perhaps it is a good thing,” said I, “that you didn’t go, and that you didn’t get so seasick that you would be ready to renounce your country’s flag and embrace Mormonism if such things would make you feel better.”  But that is the only thing that is good about it, and I have a cloud on my recollection which shall never be lifted until Corinne is old enough to travel and we come here with her.

But although the storm was so bad, it was not bad enough to keep us from making our water trip to Glasgow, for the boat we took did not have to go out to sea.  It was a wonderfully beautiful passage we made among the islands and along the coast, with the great mountains on the mainland standing up above everything else.  After a while we got to the Crinan Canal, which is in reality a short cut across the field.  It is nine miles long and not much wider than a good-sized ditch, but it saves more than a hundred miles of travel around an island.  We was on a sort of a toy steamboat which went its way through the fields and bushes and grass so close we could touch them; and as there was eleven locks where the boat had to stop, we got out two or three times and walked along the banks to the next lock.  That being the kind of a ride Jone likes, he blessed Buxton.  At the other end of the canal we took a bigger steamboat which carried us to Glasgow.