A month previous, this point had been the most distant in Scotland from steam-routes of transportation and travel.

Now southern sportsmen were hiring up "the shooting" for many miles on both sides of the line, making the hills and glens echo with their fusillades.

Blair Castle, the duke's mansion, is a very ordinary building in appearance, looking from the public road like a large four-story factory painted white, with small, old- fashioned windows.

He himself was lying in a very painful and precarious condition, with a cancer in the throat, from which it was the general impression that he never would recover.

The day preceding, the Queen had visited him, while en route for Balmoral, having gone sixty miles out of her way to comfort him with such an expression of her sympathy.
The next day I reached the northern boundary of the Duke of Atholl's estates, having walked for full forty miles continuously through it.
Passed over a very bleak, treeless, barren waste of mountain and moorland, most of it too rocky or soilless for even heather.