For then you think it, in a mist, a Mediterranean sea. behold many miles of tumbling waves, with no land beyond; and were a ship to rise up in full sail, she would seem voyaging on to some distant shore.' Perhaps the nautical grumbler now on board would prefer a mist and tumbling waves to this clear sky and placid water. As we leave Balloch Pier behind us, we have to our right, on the east side of the Loch, Balloch Castle, the modern representative of the old moated fortalice of the Earls of Lennox, which stood on the shore of the lake, but of which no ruins remain. A little further on, however, on the same shore, are the ruins of Buturich Castle; and on the southern extremity of the island of Inch-Murrin are the ruins of Lennox Castle, surrounded by a grove of oaks. Inch-Murrin is the most southern island on the Loch, as well as the largest, being a mile and a half in length, by half a mile in breadth. It is used as a deer park, and is beautifully wooded, and has a hunting box belonging to the Duke of Montrose. On the western shore we have passed Cameron House (where lives the lineal descendant of Smollett, the historian), Belretiro House, Banuchra Castle, and Arden House, near to which is the entrance to Glenfruin, the glen of wailing,' so called from the great battle fought here in 1602, between the Macgregors and Colquhouns, in which the latter clan were well nigh exterminated, while their chief, Alister of Glenstrae, having surrendered on terms, was treacherously hanged. The widows of the slain Colquhouns went to Stirling, and appeared before James the Sixth, each bearing the bloody shirt of her husband displayed on a pike, and demanding vengeance. The Macgregors were then outlawed, their name proscribed, and the 6 * adoption of it made a felony. This reduced the clan. to that predatory mode of life which was the cause of the moon in the Loch Lomond neighbourhood being called Mac Gregor's lantern.' The clan lived by blackmail, and their fortunes culminated in the famed Rob Roy, the only original portrait of whom known to exist is preserved at Arden House, a residence in which Sir Walter Scott was a frequent guest. The Colquhouns themselves followed the fashion of the time; and the story goes that the Colquhouns of Camstradden used to fire at those of Luss every Sunday, as they turned round an exposed corner on their way to church. Camstradden and Luss are on the western shore of the Loch, and our steamer will pass them very soon. At present we have sailed past Inch-Murrin, and have entered the archipelago of Loch Lomond. Professor Wilson calls it 'the Loch of a hundred isles,' but this is merely poetical exaggeration. The number of its islands, like the number of its length in miles, is thirty, though, according to tradition, it once added one or two more to this thirty. Camden, for example, speaks of an island called Camstradden, lying off the place of that name, on which was a house and an orchard; and this island has altogether disappeared, although the fishermen pretend to see the ruins of houses far beneath the surface of the water, at a spot in Camstradden Bay, about a hundred yards from the shore. There was also the floating island, said to have been constructed by * A full account of the Battle of Glenfruin is given in the Introduction to Rob Roy. 'Proudly our pibroch has thrill'd in Glen Fruin, And Bannochar's groans to our slogan replied; Boat Song in The Lady of the Lake. WONDERS OF LOCH LOMOND. 159 Keith Macindoill (a contemporary of Fingal) of large square beams of oak, firmly morticed. This was accounted one of the three wonders of Loch Lomond, the other two being 'waves without wind' (the swell in the widest part of the lake after a storm), and fish without fins' (the vipers that swam from island to island), to which Camden added a fourth wonder Ditatur fluvius Albania, saxea ligna 'Scotland's enriched with rivers, timber thrown Tradition only speaks of one floating island; but, like Professor Wilson, Drummond of Hawthornden poetically exaggerates the number; and in his poem of the 'River of Forth' has the line Strange Lomond for his floating isles renown'd. Drummond, by the way, says that Ben Jonson intended to write a fisher, or pastoral play, and set the stage of it on the Lomond lake;' and, after Ben Jonson returned to London from Hawthornden, he wrote to Drummond to send him information concerning the Loch of Lomond;' but whatever information he may have received he does not appear to have used. Drum-· mond was somewhat shocked by Ben Jonson's fondness for wine; but what would he have said to Burns, who, being at the house of a Highland laird by Loch Lomond, danced with the ladies till three in the morning, and then, to quote his own words, we ranged round the bowl till the good-fellow hour of six, except a few minutes that we went out to pay our devotions to the glorious lamp of day peering over the towering top of Ben Lomond. We all kneeled; our worthy landlord's son held the bowl; each man a full glass in his hand; and I, as a priest, repeated some rhyming nonsense, like Thomas a Rhymer's prophecies, I suppose.' CHAPTER XV. THE LAKE FULL OF ISLANDS. A Cluster of Islands-The Yew of Inch-Callioch-Buchanan's PASSING Inch-Murrin, we draw near a cluster of islands which overlap each other in such a way that they form a chain of wooded rocks between us and the eastern shore of the Loch. These are the islands of Cra-inch, Torr-inch, Aber, Clair-inch, InchCallioch, and Inch-Fad. Of these, the little island of Clair-inch gave the Buchanans their slogan or warcry; and Inch-Callioch, the island of women,' or 'the Nuns' Isle,' still bears traces, in its ancient cemetery (used up to the present time, and containing monuments to the Macgregors), of the establishment to which its name alludes. A parish church supplanted the nunnery, and in its turn was superseded by that church which has been built about a mileand-a-half eastward of the Loch, and is called by the name of Buchanan, into which title the original name of the parish and island (Inch-Callioch) has been merged. Above this church is the pass of Beal BIRTHPLACE OF BUCHANAN. 161 'maha,' mentioned in the fourth canto of "The Lady of the Lake.' Inch-Callioch is two-and-a-half miles in circuit, is beautifully wooded, and is one of the prettiest islands in Loch Lomond. From a yew-tree on this island was procured the wood for the Fiery Cross, sent forth by Roderick Dhu. The shaft and limbs were rods of yew, From here, and south-east of the islet of Inch-Aber, the lake forms a beautiful bay, in the midst of whose curve the river Endrick appears, flowing down from the Lennox Hills through the lovely valley of 'Sweet Ennerdale.' At the further end of the valley, at the distance of some six miles from the Loch, is the village of Killearn, the birth-place of George Buchanan, to whom an obelisk, 103 feet high, and nineteen feet square at the base, was erected in 1788. A silver medal, with the following inscription, was placed in the foundation stone: -- In Memoriam, Georgii Buchanani, Jacobus Craig, architect, Edinburgen. From the canine nature of the Latin, especially in the last line, it is perhaps as well that they have hidden from view this inscription in honour of one whose Latinity was so classical and correct. Midway between Killearn and Loch Lomond is a deep chaldron-shaped Linn, called the Pot of Gartness,' into which the river leaps from a great height, M |