But let us be off to the mountains, and endeavour to interest our beloved reader in a Highland Cottage--in any one, taken at hap-hazard, from a hundred. You have been roaming all day among the mountains, and perhaps seen no house except at a dwindling distance. Probably you have wished not to see any house, but a ruined shieling--a deserted hut--or an unroofed and dilapidated shed for the outlying cattle of some remote farm. But now the sun has inflamed all the western heaven, and darkness will soon descend. There is now a muteness more stern and solemn than during unfaded daylight. List--the faint, far-off, subterranean sound of the bagpipe! Some old soldier, probably, playing a gathering or a coronach. The narrow dell widens and widens into a great glen, in which you just discern the blue gleam of a loch. The martial music is more distinctly heard--loud, fitful, fierce, like the trampling of men in battle. Where is the piper? In a cave, or within the Fairies' Knowe? At the door of a hut. His eyes were extinguished by ophthalmia, and there he sits, fronting the sunlight, stone-blind. Long silver hair flows down his broad shoulders, and you perceive that, when he rises, he will rear up a stately bulk. The music stops, and you hear the bleating of goats. There they come, prancing down the rocks, and stare upon the stranger. The old soldier turns himself towards the voice of the Sassenach, and, with the bold courtesy of the camp, bids him enter the hut. One minute's view has sufficed to imprint the scene for ever on the memory--a hut whose turf walls and roof are incorporated with the living mountain, and seem not the work of man's hand, but the casual architecture of some convulsion--the tumbling down of fragments from the mountain-side by raging torrents, or a partial earthquake; for all the scenery about is torn to pieces--like the scattering of some wide ruin. The imagination dreams of the earliest days of our race, when men harboured, like the other creatures, in places provided by nature. But even here, there are visible traces of cultivation working in the spirit of a mountainous region--a few glades of the purest verdure opened out among the tall brackens, with a birch-tree or two dropped just where the eye of taste could have wished, had the painter planted the sapling, instead of the winds of heaven having wafted thither the seed--a small croft of barley, surrounded by a cairn-like wall made up of stones cleared from the soil, and a patch of potato ground, neat almost as the garden that shows in a nook its fruit-bushes and a few flowers. All the blasts that ever blew must be unavailing against the briery rock that shelters the hut from the airt of storms; and the smoke may rise under its lee, unwavering on the windiest day. There is sweetness in all the air, and the glen is noiseless, except with the uncertain murmur of the now unswollen waterfalls. That is the croak of the raven sitting on his cliff half-way up Ben-Oura; and hark, the last belling of the red-deer, as the herd lies down in the mist among the last ridge of heather, blending with the shrubless stones, rocks, and cliffs that girdle the upper regions of the vast mountain.