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I am not going to try my hand at word-pictures of these glorious landscapes, for “how can a man can what he canna can?” as I once heard a Highland lad sagaciously express himself in our foreign tongue. One had better not invite one’s readers even to land on Arran, lest there might be a difficulty in getting them off again; but if they do, let them not omit the ascent of Goatfell, no perilous adventure, for a view hardly surpassed in Scotland, as shown in Black’s Where shall we go? a work over which the present author has some rights of plagiarism.

The summit is composed of mighty rocks, ensconced among which one may shelter from the searching wind and gaze in comfort at the wild picture around and below—Glen Rosa at our feet, with its sharp precipices beyond rising into the pinnacled heights of A Chir and Cir Vohr; the saddle into Glen Sannox (the glen itself is invisible from here), and the equally sharp and even loftier ridges beyond that glen; the nearer range of Goatfell itself extending round a nameless glen below us, and terminating in a sharp peak that overhangs the village of Corrie; and beyond the limits of the island itself and the broad belt of sea which allows the eye to range unchecked, a glorious bewilderment of heights and hollows innumerable, with here the smoke of a manufacturing town, and there the familiar shape of some mainland mountain-giant, the view extending on a clear day, it is said, from Ben Nevis to the Isle of Man.