Page:A Companion and Useful Guide to the Beauties of Scotland.djvu/312

294 were four men in that party, and they could procure only one saddle and bridle; the lucky he, to whom this luxury was allotted, soon resigned the use of the bridle; trusting, like the rest of his companions, to the better knowledge and experience of his shelty. They all declared to me, that when left to themselves, those sagacious little beasts, on the most difficult and dangerous moors, would pat a suspicious place with their fore-feet, and try a slippery piece of rock, before they would venture to step upon it; and were continually looking to the right and the left to discover which was the soundest spot; and after a mature examination, would turn this way or that, or take a circuitous route to gain the safest footing. The little shelty that carried me to Loch Ericht was not quite so sagacious; but, upon the whole, he did tolerably well, and I at last arrived at the lake; but such a solitary waste I never before beheld. The lake looks like a broad river, with immense, and most of them bare craggy mountains, rising perpendicularly from it; except here and there alpine wood creeping up their sides, till the shivering stones debar vegetation. On the east bank of this lake, at the south end of it where I embarked, is a prodigiously high, rough, bare