Loch Awe, September 14, 1889.--Under a soft gray sky and through fields that still are slumbering in the early morning mist, the train rolls out of Edinburgh, bound for the north. The wind blows gently; the air is cool; strips of thin, fleecy cloud are driving over the distant hill-tops, and the birds are flying low. The track is by Queensferry, and in that region many little low stone cottages are seen, surrounded with simple gardens of flowers. For a long time the train runs through a deep ravine, with rocky banks on either hand, but presently it emerges into pastures where the sheep are grazing, and into fields in which the late harvest stands garnered in many graceful sheaves. Tall chimneys, vigorously smoking, are visible here and there in the distant landscape. The fat, black rooks are taking their morning flight, clamouring as they go. Stone houses with red roofs glide into the picture, and a graceful church-spire rises on a remote hill-top. In all directions there are trees, but they seem of recent growth, for no one of them is large. Soon the old cattle-market town of Falkirk springs up in the prospect, girt with fine hills and crested with masses of white and black smoke that is poured upward from the many tall chimneys of its busy ironworks. The houses here are made of gray stone and of red brick, and many of them are large, square buildings, seemingly commodious and opulent. A huge cemetery, hemmed in with trees and shrubs, is seen to skirt the city. Carron River, with its tiny but sounding cataract, is presently passed, and at Larbert your glance rests lovingly upon "the little gray church on the windy hill." North of this place, beyond the Forth, the country in the distance is mountainous, while all the intermediate region is rich with harvest-fields. Kinnaird lies to the eastward, while northward a little way is the famous field of Bannockburn. Two miles more and the train pauses in "gray Stirling," glorious with associations of historic splendour and ancient romance. The Castle of Stirling is not as ruggedly grand as that of Edinburgh, but it is a noble architectural pile, and it is nobly placed on a great crag fronting the vast mountains and the gloomy heavens of the north. The best view of it is obtained looking at it southward, and as I gazed upon it, under a cold and frowning sky, the air was populous with many birds that circled around its cone-shaped turrets, and hovered over the plain below, while across the distant mountain-tops, east, west, and north, dark and ragged masses of mist were driven, in wild, tempestuous flight. Speeding onward now, along the southern bank of the Forth, the traveller takes a westerly course, past Gargunnock and Kippen, seeing little villages of gray stone cottages nestled in the hill-gaps, distant mountain-sides, clad with furze, dark patches of woodland, and moors of purple heather commingled with meadows of brilliant green. The sun breaks out, for a few moments, and the sombre hue of the gray sky is lightened with streaks of gold. At Bucklyvie there is a second pause, and then the course is northwest, through banks and braes of heather, to peaceful Aberfoyle and the mountains of Menteith.