"'And here his course the chieftain staid,
Threw down his target and his plaid.'"
"You are right," said I; and then I began again:
"'Then each at once his falchion drew,
Each on the ground his scabbard threw,
Each look'd to sun, and stream, and plain,
As what they ne'er might see again;
Then foot, and point, and eye opposed,
In dubious strife they darkly closed.'"
I didn't repeat any more of the poem, though everybody was listening
quite respectful without thinking of laughing, and as for Jone, I could
see by the way he sat and looked about him that his tinder had caught
my spark; but I knew that the thing for me to do here was not to give
out but take in, and so, to speak in figures, I drank in the whole of
Lake Vannachar, as we drove along its lovely marge until we came to the
other end, and the driver said we would now go over the Brigg of Turk.
At this up I jumped and said:
"'And when the Brigg of Turk was won,
The headmost horseman rode alone.'"
I had sense enough not to quote the next two lines, because when I had
read them to Jone he said that it was a shame to use a horse that way.
We now came to Loch Achray, at the other end of which is the
Trossachs, where we stopped for the night, and when the driver told me
the mountain we saw before us was Ben-Venue, I repeated the lines:
"'The hunter marked that mountain high,
The lone lake's western boundary,
And deem'd the stag must turn to bay,
Where that huge rampart barr'd the way.'"
At last we reached the Trossachs Hotel, which stands near the wild
ravines filled with bristling woods where the stag was lost, with the
lovely lake in front and Ben-Venue towering up on the other side. I was
so excited I could scarcely eat, and no wonder, because for the greater
part of the day I had breathed nothing but the spirit of Scott's
poetry. I forgot to say that from the time we left Callander until we
got to the hotel the rain poured down steadily, but that didn't make
any difference to me. A human being soaked with the "Lady of the Lake"
is rain-proof.
Letter Number Twenty-four
EDINBURGH
I was sorry to stop my last letter right in the middle of the "Lady of
the Lake" country, but I couldn't get it all in, and the fact is, I
can't get all I want to say in any kind of a letter. The things I have
seen and want to write about are crowded together like the Scottish
mountains.
On the day after we got to Trossachs Hotel, and I don't know any place
I would rather spend weeks at than there, Jone and I walked through the
"darksome glen" where the stag,
