SCOTLAND has limits. I do not possess a full set of the Journal, but I feel certain that in one of them there will be found an eloquent description of a view from a high and central Ben, which, in addition to the inevitable Arthur's Seat and Barra Head, embraced the Bell Rock, Cumberland, Ireland, and the cliffs of the Hoy, and dazzled the eyes of the probably solitary-wanderer. One man has listed all the peaks of and above 3,000 feet high, and another has climbed them.

The Guide Book advances north and west as relentlessly as "civilisation" moves west across the continent of America, and everything illuminating of a geological, zoological, or botanical character has been, or is being, told us by experts. Well then, some one may say, tell us about a new climb, or an escape from a storm, a savage stag, or a keeper; anything new, instructive, or bizarre. Unfortunately, I am blind to the wayside pimpernel, deaf to the nightingale, never reached the fourth chapter of M'Millan's Geology, and if I have done a new climb it has been by missing one of the milestones on the North-East Buttress. I have therefore absolutely nothing instructive or interesting to say about Mountaineering.

Humbly incompetent, and frequently sleepless from a sense of fatuousness in these ill-strung reflections, I can only plead love of the Scottish mountains as the sole link in coherence, and hope that some such notions as the

XLVI. A

following have attacked the brains of some of my Club mates in their less guarded moments.

Has any one else, I wonder, sat brooding on a summer evening over a Johnston or Bartholomew, gazing in a queer meditative kind of way, "like Meredith's idiot," hypnotised by the plethora of good things for the morrow? Is it to be Ben Alder or the Traprain Law? When must I be home? Will the trains suit? Is it to be a 4 A.M., 6 A.M., or after breakfast start? These and countless other complicating cares make one oblivious of all, till bang goes "the iron tongue of midnight," and nothing is planned. Sleep, two pantomimes of calisthenics, and packing have to be done before the start. Ah well! we'll see the morn's morn. Now, why is it that if the weather is bad we wake up, and if fine we sleep in? For the same reason probably that when you arrange to golf for a week, it is so settled and sultry you can hardly crawl round Machrihanish, while on Ben Nevis summit it is balmy as Gilead. Possibly from this uncertainty of Scottish weather-now all the worse that the controlling hand of our friends the observers has been removed-uncertainty with the balance tilted on the "bad" side that makes a successful expedition such unalloyed exultation, such an indelible memory. For my part I frankly confess to a preference for conventionally fine weather, viz., either no rain or small showers, only clear air, and plenty sun. The hills don't need the magnifying and eery illusion of mist, rain is a nuisance, and an anticyclone often encloses one's hill top in a ring fence of heat haze, fifteen miles off on all sides. This latter is an

intense disappointment, if, say, Meall na Cuaich has been climbed "between trains," when en route for the North, for the grand view so clearly set forth by Mr Munro, but would be just the weather for a "climb," for then the view is merely incidental. Unfortunately, as it is best to climb at least in couples, plans have to be arranged, and it so happens that in some dozen Highland "climbs," I have never escaped with a dry skin, and have frequently so rejoiced, that the bad conditions came too late for the most ticklish portion, that it has seemed out of place to grumble at sloppy boots, a hot reception on the plateau,

and the groping compass-guided descent. A grind in a real downpour, say, up Beinn Chaluim and on to Craig Mhor, coming back by the railway loop to Tyndrum has a real wild joy of its own. No improvement is expected, no hopes held out. But to start on a bicycle to ride twenty miles to the longed-for mountain's foot and find that a panting rush brings one up just an hour late, and that nothing is on show, is as saddening as frequent. Whereas, given good weather, it is an easy day to leave the links of Machrie, and return by the dusk of an April evening after visiting the summit of Beinn an Oir, from which can be descried as if laid out on a map, the ancient kingdom of the Isles, the land of the oared galley, of warriors as remote as Fingal, as authentic as Coll Kittach, and from which can be surveyed the home of Siol Diarmid, the clan that most worked the fall of the "Douglases of the Highlands," the almost royal house of Somerled.

But, to return to the hills, what is the attraction of a view? Mr Baddeley, I think, it is who has made out quite a case for monotony and dulness as the rewards of a Highland ascent, and compares the views seen from our Bens with the more proportioned and complete pictures which are to be got by climbing the fells of the Lake District. Many have followed Horace Walpole in his opinion that a mountain looks best from the foot, and told us that the most beautiful things in nature are the limited compact beauties of a pass or a partial vista of a loch. I shall not attempt to controvert this, but assert that the mountaineer goes first in search of "a new land ❞—something utterly different from his everyday surroundings— and secondly in search of knowledge. As remarked before Scotland is small, and is pre-eminently a country of landmarks. The so-called Lowlands bristle with them, and the Highlands are a positive storehouse of mountain forms of distinctive and ingratiating individuality, from the "V" of Ben More and Stobinian to the knobs of Ben Loyal. And this is the abiding joy-to see old friends from a new point of view, and to show them to others. Three wellchosen peaks would reveal the prevailing common features of a Scottish top, i.e., the sea of peaks, the shutting out of

glens, the stiffness of those lochs which can be seen, and finally the sea. One panorama can never be in a superficial way vastly different from another. But once each Ben gets his personality well wedged into the brain, the view is no longer a bewildering effect, but a detailed and understood picture, so stimulative to pure contemplation, that one can realise that to say, “Und meine Seele spannte weit ihre Flügel aus," is no exaggeration under such conditions.

But the whole attitude of men towards mountains is like all else, subject to change and development. To the eye of a tyro Ben Vourie from the nearest Cruachan peak looks a "horrid precipice"; the Cullins looks to the tourist, on the rare occasions when it deigns to show itself in all its superb nudity, like a forbidding and inaccessible fretsaw. To the eye of an expert every hill face is scarred and pockmarked by an imaginary dotted line, up which he can see a path where others see none, and every splinter from Garsbheinn to Sgur nan Gillean is full of meaning. It is the advance from ignorance and awe to knowledge and appreciation. People do not collapse into bogs or at once tumble down precipices because a mist comes on. These chimeras and exaggerations on the lines of those of the English sportsman, whose estimate of Braeriach has recently delighted readers of the Journal, seem as far off as the eighteenth century. What one does begin to realise is there are certain risks to be run, and if a leg is broken and no one is there or comes within, shall we say, the next sixty-four days, unpleasant consequences ensue, and that two stones may be barely a safe support on a good-going glissade. It is rather like the substitution of a perfectly rational fear of footpads for a groundless dread of ghosts and evil spirits the fear being of course relative to the likelihood of molestation and the nerves of the wanderer in the darkness.

I confess to having once had a feeling of presumption, meriting retribution, when I first took to the hills, and after bagging some top not more alarming than Carn Liath, thought of continuing my road to the greater glories of Ben a Gloe. It all looked so menacing and gigantic. But now