mirror to the mountains on both sides.  Several carts laden with wool had halted by the side of the lake and these also were reflected on its surface.  We considered the view pictured in this lake to be one of the prettiest sights we had ever seen in the sunshine, and the small streams flowing down the mountain sides looked very beautiful, resembling streaks of silver.  We compared the scene in imagination with the changes two months hence, when the streams would be lines of ice and the mountain roads covered with a surface of frozen snow, making them difficult to find and to walk upon, and rendering travelling far less pleasant than on this beautiful morning.  We often thought that we should not have completed our walk if we had undertaken it at the same period of the year but in the reverse direction, since we were walking far too late in the season for a journey of this description.  We considered ourselves very fortunate in walking from John o’ Groat’s to Land’s End, instead of from Land’s End to John o’ Groat’s, for by the time we finished deep snow might have covered these Northern altitudes.  How those poor women and children must have suffered at the time of the massacre of Glencoe, when, as Sir Walter Scott writes—­

flying from their burning huts, and from their murderous visitors, the half-naked fugitives committed themselves to a winter morning of darkness, snow, and storm, amidst a wilderness the most savage in the Western Highlands, having a bloody death behind them, and before them tempest, famine, and desolation when some of them, bewildered by the snow-wreaths, sank in them to rise no more!

[Illustration:  BRIDGE OF ORCHY.]

They were doubtless ignorant of the danger they were in, even as they escaped up the glen, practically the only way of escape from Glencoe, for Duncanson had arranged for four hundred soldiers to be at the top end of the pass at four o’clock that morning, the hour at which the massacre was to begin at the other end.  Owing to the heavy fall of snow, however, the soldiers did not arrive until eleven o’clock in the forenoon—­long after the fugitives had reached places of safety.

Like many other travellers before us, we could not resist passing a bitter malediction on the perpetrators of this cruel wrong, although they had long since gone to their reward.  And yet we are told that it hastened that amalgamation of the two kingdoms which has been productive of so much good.

We had our breakfast or lunch served on one of the tables ranged outside the front of the shepherd’s house, and in quite a romantic spot, whence we walked on to a place which had figured on mileposts for a long distance named “Kingshouse.”  Here we expected to find a village, but as far as we could see there was only one fairly large house there, and that an inn.  What king it was named after did not appear, but there was no other house in sight.  Soon after passing it we again came