The long inland waterway, of which the “Caledonian Canal” is the main portion, unites the waters of the German Ocean, at Moray Firth, with those of the Atlantic, which wash the shores of the Island of Mull. Considered as one highway, this trough, which forms also the eastern boundary of “the Highlands,” was made in part by nature and in part by art. In easy and safe passage, it saves the shipmasters about four hundred miles of coasting voyage around the north of Great Britain, through the stormy Pentland Firth which divides Caithness from the Orkney Islands. The total length of the canal proper is about sixty miles; the part made by man’s work covering twenty-two miles. A chain of fresh-water lakes, four in number, on various levels, stretching along the line of the great glen of Scotland, has been united by water ladders, up which ships are lifted and by which time is saved.

The route of the canal was surveyed in 1773 by James Watt, the famous engineer, better known in the annals of steam. Following an Act of Parliament in 1803, the canal, constructed under the supervision of Thomas Telford, was opened to navigation in 1822. There are twenty-eight locks, each having the standard dimension of one hundred and sixty feet length, so that steamers of comfortable length can go through. It was on one of these, the Fusileer, that we travelled from Oban to Inverness, on another we moved in reverse order, and great were these days. One was sunny and warm. The other was so cloudy and cold that a grate fire at the hotel at Fort William felt thoroughly delightful.

On the second of these inland voyages we were on the steamer Gondolier. From Oban we cross Loch Linnhe, which forms the southern end of the great canal, and call at Ardgour. At the head of the loch we stop at Fort William, formerly called “the Key of the Highlands.” It is now a town consisting chiefly of a long, narrow street, full of hotels. The fort was originally erected in 1655 by Cromwell’s General Monk and called “Kilmallie.” Under the reign of King William, in 1690, General Hugh McKay enlarged the work and named it after the Dutch king, the town being called “Maryburgh,” in honor of the queen. It was to this place that the perpetrators of the massacre at Glencoe came to divide their spoil.

In 1715 and again in 1746, the followers of “Bonnie Prince Charlie,” the Jacobites, besieged the place, but unsuccessfully. No remnants of the fort, which was dismantled in 1860, now remain, for in 1890 the ruins were wholly removed to provide room for the iron rails and railway station; for, since the hills come down close together, there is not much level real-estate room. It illustrates the sadness of things to find here great distilleries which are large enough to mar the landscape.

The town produced a poet, and near the railway station is an obelisk to the memory of Ewen MacLachlin, who wrote verses in Gaelic. Four miles away is Ben Nevis, 4406 feet high, the loftiest mountain in the British Islands. Later, at Inverness, I met a Scottish artist who had painted the mountain from many points of view, but he seemed more impressed with its ugliness and shaggy character than with its beauty. In fact, in comparing the artistic work of this painter with that of Mr. Robert Allan, who transfers to canvas the ideal loveliness of the ocean,—both Scottish and both masterly,—we recalled that inimitable passage of Ruskin, contrasting the form and functions of the mountains and the sea, which furnishes so illuminating a commentary on the passage written by an ancient admirer of nature and its Creator,—“Thy righteousness is like the great mountains; thy judgments are a great deep.”

We noted, in our summer travels, not a few men of the easel. A mile and a half from the town is the grand old ruin of Inverlochie, to which many landscape painters resort. Other places of interest are the site of the battlefield of 1645 and the castle of Lord Abinger, built in the Scottish baronial style.

Yet at all these attractions we did not much more than glance, despite the importunities of local guides, who sounded their praises unremittingly. The reason for which we stopped for a day or two in this mountain stronghold was not to study military fortification, or to see the town, which, apart from its summer life, has little allurement for the tourist who values time. We were there to see the Highland games, for this day in August was the date set for “the gathering of the clans” of the shire. They came not for battle as in the old times, but for the Lochaber Highland games, such as the hammer-throwing, putting the stone, pole-vaulting, leaping, and jumping; besides the various Scottish dances, such as prancing and stepping over swords and the Highland fling.

Heavy rain came down in the early part of the morning, and during the whole day there was a drizzle, making the air heavy with dampness and the ground meadows miry. We supposed of course that there would be no exhibition.

Vain thought! What does a Highlander care about moisture? To him rain is but an old friend, whom he would no more think of speaking against than of reviling his mother. Indeed, it is his native element. So in the afternoon, our lady, donning her mackintosh, which she had just purchased at Oban, and I with umbrella and overcoat splashed over the fields to the hillside and meadows, where thousands of people were gathered together. There may have been other umbrellas in use, but they were not conspicuous, and certainly not numerous. Some of the athletic performances were admirable and the achievements of manly strength were worthy of the applause which they so generously received.

Yet an alien, one not of the heather, cannot be rapturous in honest praise of the dances, at least those which were prolonged to the full and apparently appropriate time, and which the spectators seemed greatly to enjoy. It was something, no doubt, to behold an able-bodied man in a dress that quite equalled that of the peacock, jumping about among the crossed lines of naked steel without getting his toes cut off. There was undoubtedly some grace also in the way he curved his arms above his head. Doubtless the very swish of his kilts and the sight of his bare and hairy legs filled some bosoms with emotions of envy, accompanied, as they were, with what seemed blood-curdling cries, the relics of old savagery. Probably my education had been neglected, for I should not wish to attend these exhibitions too frequently, unless paid handsomely for the labor incurred.

Indeed, my feelings of appreciation were very much on the same par with those experiences when, in Japan, we were expected to sit on the mats with our lower limbs doubled up, or tied in a knot, during hours of personal agony. These classic performances were manifestly full of delight to the cultured admirers of pose and motion, in the “No” dances, though insufferably tedious to those whose legs had fallen asleep. Even in later times, when chairs were provided and the accessories were suggestive of comfort, there was not enough in the dancing of the “No” operatic performers or in the antics of the geisha, to serve as magnets.

It was easy to explain, however, why and wherefore Scottish cheeks are so suggestive of rose gardens, and also why consumption is so common. The rain did indeed redden the complexions, but as to the number of cases of pneumonia, or tuberculosis, which ensued after exposure on this chilly day, we cannot inform our readers, not having the statistics at hand. To this, however, we can testify, that when we got back to Room No. 6, of the Waverley Hotel, we were the subjects of a sort of telepathy that enabled us to feel profound sympathy with Peary when in search of the North Pole. Never did a grate full of live coals seem more welcome. We almost literally hung up ourselves, or at least what had been our outward semblance, to dry. When properly desiccated, we retired early, in order the more to enjoy the glorious island voyage among the Highlands which we knew awaited us next morning.

It was genuine Scotch weather when we woke up and looked out upon a landscape dominated by Ben Nevis, of whose towering form we could catch glimpses now and then through the cloud rifts, while on the hills around us lay patches and lines of snow. At times we were in that “Scotch mist,” in which, as hostile critics declare, the metaphysicians who live north of the Tweed do at times get lost. Just when it began or left off raining might have puzzled a weather bureau man to tell. As for ourselves, we could have taken oath as to our own inability if we had been called upon in court. If a jury had been empanelled, then and there, to determine whether it was or was not raining, the verdict in either case would undoubtedly have been, as became the country, “Not proven.”

Nevertheless, after we had crossed the gangway of the boat, a sister ship to the Gondolier of yesterday, and looked over the landscape, from both starboard and port side, we began to think it was true, as Professor Blaikie once said, that “Scotland is like a pebble, it requires rain to bring out its colors.” It is certain that many spots in this charming glen did look like the water lines, waves, and layers of varied tints which we have seen on the surfaces of chalcedony.

When at the lapidary’s I used to watch the process of cutting in half a stone, rolled for many ages mayhap and ground daily on the outside by glacial or stream action, it seemed for a few seconds as if the diamond saw, revolving with its irresistible edge, was to cut in vain and reveal nothing. From an outward view all beauty was hidden and the pebble seemed thoroughly ugly and uninteresting. Nor could I guess that treasures were hidden in the interior; but when the hemispheres were in our hands, emerging from their baptism in clean water, there was revealed, if the stone were hollow, a grotto of crystals, rich in Nature’s heraldry of color, telling the story of its fiery past. It seemed a more wonderful story, in fact, than that of Ali Baba and Open Sesame in fiction. Or, if solid, and, like Venus, born from water, and formed in slow deposit of liquid instead of from the cosmic flames, the curvilinear strata white, ruby red, black, yellow, and brown, seemed to excel in splendor.

Even so, to-day Scotland revealed herself as a new wonderland. The Caledonian pebble seemed a sapphire. For when, toward noon, something like dry weather arrived and sunbursts were occasional, Scotland looked as fresh as her maidens and almost as beautiful. We passed cataracts in full activity. One, which we did not see, ninety feet high and probably the finest on the great island, was near Fort Augustus. Beyond this, called “Foyers,” was another fall thirty feet high. To one, however, who has seen Niagara a hundred times, and who dwells near Taughannock Falls, which are thirty feet higher, and near Lake Cayuga, with two hundred waterfalls within a radius of twenty miles, a cataract must be out of the ordinary to be visited at the expenditure of time and money, when both these assets are limited and things more novel are to be seen. In our home town of Ithaca, as we two Americans mused, in that conceit and love of business peculiar to our nationals, we have a “local Niagara” over eighty feet high. Why visit Foyers?

At one of the lochs, we saw an Irishman, with the popular and traditional face, shape, and garb; that is, of the kind we read about in novels and see on the stage. He had on brogans, short breeches split in the end at the knees, woollen stockings, a small and short-tailed coat, a stumpy shillaly, a narrow-brimmed high hat, with pipe stuck in the front band and a shamrock set in another place. Besides bog-trotters’ capers and the dancing of an Irish jig, he sang songs which recalled boyhood’s memories in Philadelphia. After the potato famine in Ireland, the Emerald Isle was semi-depopulated, and the emigrant ships, despite the Know-Nothings, set their prows in fleets to the Land of Hope. I often saw seven ships a day bringing over the raw material of citizenship. Some of the girls, as we learned from our household experience in employing domestics, had never gone up—though on ship and with us, at first, they came backwards down—a pair of stairs. Such green but promising maids had never dwelt in a house built with more than one story, or touched a faucet, or lighted a gas jet. The Irishman’s song, in which his mention of Philadelphia was mnemonic, was delightful to hear. Another song, which as a child I heard my father’s coal-drivers and coal-heavers sing, told of travels nearer home, and of this I caught the words. They ran thus:—

With this son of Erin was a dirty and very skinny Highland lad, in kilts and other checkered woollen garments much the worse for wear. He also danced what was probably a Highland fling, though an almost vicious desire possessed some of us to fling him into the bathtub.

It is a good sign for the future of a noble race that the manufacture of soap occupies many people in Scotland. Though the glens are full of distilleries, which are sure to create poverty and dirt, perhaps we must consider soap-boiling as a very honorable occupation and the manufacture of this cleansing material as an antidote to some of the mischief done by John Barleycorn. How terrible is the scourge of alcohol in Great Britain was revealed, as never before, during the war crisis of 1915, when even an appeal to patriotism could not make the sodden workmen give up their cups. My kinsman, the United States Consul at Dundee, showed me the statistics of the liquor traffic in Scotland alone, which were appalling. Even Christians, supposed to be devout in worship and genuine in faith, invest their money, and some of them exclusively, in the distilleries, thus upsetting at one end what the gospel agencies are doing at the other. The British Empire is thus handicapped in the race for progress. Yet who from the glorious Yankee nation can throw a stone, especially when he sees the “American bar,” “American long drinks,” and “American mixed drinks” flauntingly advertised in Europe? We have heard, however, that the “long drinks” are soft and harmless.

While propelled along Loch Ness, an earth-cleft, narrow, deep, and twenty-four miles in length, we are again reminded of our home near Lake Cayuga, fairest in the Iroquois chain of “finger lakes” in the Empire State, and one of the deepest; for on either side of the Caledonian Canal are metamorphic rocks rising out of crystal clear water, and beneath, in the Byronic profundity of “a thousand feet in depth below,” the rocky bottom. Grander and more rugged, however, is the scenery, for the mountains are here higher, even as the water is deeper, than in Iroquois land. The Scottish Highlands are the fragments of the earliest land that emerged above the prehistoric oceans. For centuries they formed a boundary in ethnology, politics, and religion, even as in the æons of geology they form a frontier of chronology.

When our voyage ends, we find that it is some distance between the stopping-place of the steamer at Muirtown and Inverness. Since names and sounds are continually playing tricks, summoning from the privacy of memory forms long ago forgotten and ever retreating in the perspective of the past, I recall my old Scotch professor at the Central High School in Philadelphia. That good man MacMurtrie—with a name meaning, I suppose, of, or from, or son of the Muirtrie, or Moor-tree clan—first introduced thousands of youth, through his lexicon, his fascinating lectures, and his choice cabinets, to the great world of nature and science, and to the rapturous joy of discovery of order and beauty in the mathematics of the universe.

From Muirtown, we take the hotel omnibus and soon enter “Rose-red Inverness,” the bright and lively town, which in August bursts into the full bloom of its summer activities.