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In the morning they were to start for a glimpse of the Atlantic across the purple bogs of the Lews; going by way of Mull and Canna, and swinging round Barra Head, toward the red, rent bastions of Skye. Through that charmful circle of the outer isles, with their slumbrous tarns, and meres, and treeless solitudes they went.

On the 18th of June they first fell in with icebergs, flying amid which were numberless petrels, kittiwakes, tarns, and other winged inhabitants of the northern regions. Some of these bergs, of which fifty were seen at a time, were of great size.

For her those long stretches of wild moorland, with the dark silent tarns and far-distant line of blue hills, the high cliffs where the sea wind roared with all the bluster and fury of a late March, the sea itself with its ever-changing face, the faint streaks of brilliant color in the evening sky, or the wan glare of a stormy morning all these things had their own peculiar meaning to her, and awoke always some echo of response in her heart.

Swirling clouds and mist- wreaths had obscured our view of the sound when we were entering, but glimpses of snow-slopes had given us hope that an overland journey could be begun from that point. A few patches of very rough, tussocky land, dotted with little tarns, lay between the glaciers along the foot of the mountains, which were heavily scarred with scree-slopes.

Perhaps in Scotland one might be more inclined to call them mountain tarns, for neither of them is more than a mile in length, and in parts they are very narrow; yet they are deep, and, as the people at Al Hafa proudly told us, you could float thereon any steamer you liked, which may or may not be true, but their existence in a country like Arabia is, after all, their chief cause for renown.

Who that has any knowledge of the mountains cannot recall the effect of these solitary tarns, like well-eyes in the wilderness, gleaming in the sunshine, dark in the gloom? The Prince, good mountaineer as he was, grew glad to remount his pony and let the docile, sure-footed creature pick its steps through the gathering fog, which was making the ascent an adventure not free from danger.

From the summit, which is indicated by a pile of large stones, eight different sheets of water are seen, viz., Windermere, Rydal, Grasmere, and Coniston Lakes, and Loughrigg, Easdale, Elterwater, and Blelham Tarns. The Solway Firth is also distinctly visible."

There is something mysterious in loch-fishing, in the tastes and habits of the fish which inhabit the innumerable lakes and tarns of Scotland. It is not always easy to account either for their presence or their absence, for their numbers or scarcity, their eagerness to take or their "dourness." For example, there is Loch Borlan, close to the well-known little inn of Alt-na-geal-gach in Sutherland.

It was the world of his soul's origin a place of beautiful and yet of noisome creations also; of white mountains and green hills, and yet of tarns in which crawled evil things; a place of vagrant, hurricanes and tidal-waves and cloud-bursts, of forests alive with quarrelling! and affrighted beasts.

Gently the door closed, with a firm click of its latch, in face of Mr. Batchgrew. "Nay, nay!" muttered Mrs. Tarns, desolated. And Mr. Batchgrew, once more justly angered, raised his hand to the heavy knocker. "Dunna' knock, mester! Dunna' knock!" Mrs. Tarns implored in a whisper. "Missis is asleep.