United States or Uganda ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The forests, though interminable, were but composed of trees; the mountains and rivers, though on a larger scale, were not associated in the mind with the exertions of patriotic valour, and the achievements of individual enterprize, like the Alps or the Danube, the Grampians or the Tweed.
Before he made any preparations he inserted an advertisement in several of the leading dailies. It ran somehow like this: "Wanted A capable and intelligent assistant to take part in dangerous expedition to Grampians. Apply," and then followed his name and address.
They knew, moreover, that directly ahead of him in this direction there was a strong Covenanting power, under the Earl of Seaforth, and consisting of the garrison of Inverness and recruits from Moray, Ross, Sutherland and Caithness. Evidently it was Montrose's intention to meet this power and dispose of it, so as to have the country north of the Grampians wholly his own.
Though the buildings covered but a small part of the space over which they now extend; though the arrival of a brig in the port was a rare event; though the Exchange was the middle of a miry street, in which stood a market cross much resembling a broken milestone; though the sittings of the municipal council were held in a filthy den with a roughcast wall; though the best houses were such as would now be called hovels; though the best roofs were of thatch; though the best ceilings were of bare rafters; though the best windows were, in bad weather, closed with shutters for want of glass; though the humbler dwellings were mere heaps of turf, in which barrels with the bottoms knocked out served the purpose of chimneys; yet to the mountaineer of the Grampians this city was as Babylon or as Tyre.
I am not referring to the vulgar achievements of mere wealth. Wherever these people went, to be sure, they left outposts a Mediterranean villa, a deer forest behind the Grampians, small Saturday-to-Monday establishments beside the Thames and the North Sea, and furnished abodes on short leases near Newmarket and Ascot Heaths; not to mention nomadic trifles such as houseboats and yachts.
But what seems to have moved her most was the magnificent view, which included the rich Lothians and the silver shield of the Frith, and stretched, but only, when the weather was fine enough, in the direction of Stirlingshire, to the round-backed Ochils and the blue giants, the Grampians, while at her feet lay the green gardens of Princes Street and the handsome street itself once the Nor' Loch and the Burgh Muir Allan Ramsay's house and Heriot's Hospital, or "Wark," the princely gift of the worthy jeweller to his native town.
The Grampians on the north, again, form another range of mountains of the same kind; and between these two great fields of broken, tumbled, and distorted strata, there lies a field of lesser hardness and consolidation, in general; but a field in which there is a great manifestation of subterraneous fire, and of exerted force.
The horses of Colchester's men were in such a plight after their marches among the Grampians that they could not carry a saddle. Mackay knew well how important cavalry was to the work before him.
The third or lowest division south of the Grampians consists of grey paving- stone and roofing-slate, with associated red and grey shales; these strata underlie a dense mass of conglomerate. A species of Pteraspis, of the same family, has also been found by the Reverend Hugh Mitchell in beds of corresponding age in Perthshire; and Mr.
Quentin's first impulse was to sit erect in bed and listen with astonishment to sounds, which, if they had announced a tempest, might have shamed the wildest that ever burst down from the Grampians, and again in a minute he became sensible that the tumult was not excited by the fury of the elements, but by the wrath of men.
Word Of The Day