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It poured for three hours, during which her Majesty drew and painted in her cabin. The weather cleared in the afternoon; sitting on the deck was again possible, and Loch Linnhe, Loch Eil, and the entrance to Loch Leven were not lost. At Fort William the Queen was to quit the yacht and repair to the summer quarters of Ardverikie.
In a continuance of the most dismally unpropitious weather, the Queen and her children left Ardverikie on the 17th of September, the Prince having preceded her for a night that he might visit Inverness and the Caledonian Canal. The storm continued, almost without intermission, during the whole of the voyage home.
He worked away until he had completely covered the walls with frescoes in colour. The originals of some of his best-known engravings, "The Sanctuary," "The Challenge," "The Monarch of the Glen," made their first appearance on the walls of the dining-room at Ardverikie. The house was unfortunately destroyed by fire some years later, and Landseer's frescoes perished with it.
The ascent of the hill of Tulloch on a pony, the Queen wrote, was 'the most delightful, the most romantic ride and walk I ever had. The quiet, the liberty, the Highlanders, and the hills were all thoroughly enjoyed by the Queen, and when she returned to the Lowlands it made her sad to see the country becoming 'flatter and flatter, while the English coast appeared 'terribly flat. Again the Queen and Prince-Consort were in the West Highlands in 1847, but had dreadful weather at Ardverikie, on Loch Laggan.
It was at Ardverikie, many years before, that I had first embarked on a serious study of statistics as essential to any clear comprehension of social principles and problems.
A man, who had evidently been waiting, came forward from a tuft of bracken. My luggage was extracted from the vehicle and dragged down to a boat, which was, as I now saw, waiting by the beach below; and a row of some twenty minutes took me across the loch and brought me to my journey's end. Ardverikie is a castellated building.
As that was before the days of railways, the interior of the house at Ardverikie was necessarily very plain, and the rooms were merely whitewashed. Landseer complained that the glare of the whitewash in the dining-room hurt his eyes, and without saying a word to any one, he one day produced his colours, mounted a pair of steps, and proceeded to rough-in a design in charcoal on the white walls.
By an odd coincidence, it was at Ardverikie likewise that, after years of laborious thought as to political questions which must soon, as I then foresaw, become for politicians the most vital questions of all, I received an invitation to address, with regard to these very questions, a public far wider than that of all Great Britain put together.
Such were the questions which came to possess my mind when luncheons were being eaten among heather by the pourings of some hillside brook, or when deer at the close of the day were being weighed in the larders of Ardverikie. To these questions a partial answer came sooner than I had expected. On leaving Ardverikie I paid another visit to the Lovats.
The Nobles were bound for England. I was myself going north to stay once more with Sir John and Lady Guendolen Ramsden. By the West Highland railway I reached the diminutive station of Tulloch, and a drive of twenty miles brought me to the woods, the waters, and the granite turrets of Ardverikie.
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