This was through a wild and solemn
valley, and by the side of a rushing river, full of waterfalls and deep
and diresome pools. When we reached the railroad we found a train
waiting, and we took it and went to Oban, which we reached about six
o'clock. Even this railroad trip was delightful, for we went by the
great Lake Awe, with another rushing river and mountains and black
precipices. We had a carriage all to ourselves until an old lady got in
at a station, and she hadn't been sitting in her corner more than ten
minutes before she turned to me and said:
"You haven't any lakes like this in your country, I suppose."
Now I must say that, in the heated condition I had been in ever since I
came into Scotland, a speech like that was like a squirt of cold water
into a thing full of steam. For a couple of seconds my boiling stopped,
but my fires was just as blazing as ever, and I felt as if I could turn
them on that old woman and shrivel her up for plastering her
comparisons on me at such a time.
"Of course, we haven't anything just like this," I said, "but it takes
all sorts of scenery to make up a world."
"That's very true, isn't it?" said she. "But, really, one couldn't
expect in America such a lake as that, such mountains, such grandeur!"
Now I made up my mind if she was going to keep up this sort of thing
Jone and me would change carriages when we stopped at the next station,
for comparisons are very different from poetry, and if you try to mix
them with scenery you make a mess that is not fit for a Christian. But
I thought first I would give her a word back:
"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.
