travel. Now southern sportsmen were hiring up "the shooting" for
many miles on both sides of the line, making the hills and glens
echo with their fusillades. Blair Castle, the duke's mansion, is a
very ordinary building in appearance, looking from the public road
like a large four-story factory painted white, with small, old-
fashioned windows. He himself was lying in a very painful and
precarious condition, with a cancer in the throat, from which it was
the general impression that he never would recover. The day
preceding, the Queen had visited him, while en route for Balmoral,
having gone sixty miles out of her way to comfort him with such an
expression of her sympathy.

The next day I reached the northern boundary of the Duke of Atholl's
estates, having walked for full forty miles continuously through it.
Passed over a very bleak, treeless, barren waste of mountain and
moorland, most of it too rocky or soilless for even heather. The
dashing, flashing, little Garry, which I had followed for a day or
two, thinned and narrowed down to a noisy brook as I ascended
towards its source. For a long distance the country was exceedingly
wild and desolate. Terrible must be the condition of a man
benighted therein, especially in winter. There were standing
beacons all along the road for miles, to indicate the track when it
was buried in drifting snow. These were painted posts, about six or
eight feet high, planted on the rocky, river side of the road, at a
few rods interval, to guide the traveller and keep him from dashing
over the concealed precipices. About the middle of the afternoon I
reached the summit of the two watersheds, where a horse's hoof might
so dam a balancing stream as to send it southward into the Tay or
northward into the Moray Firth. Soon a rivulet welled out in the
latter direction with a decided current. It was the Spey. A few