Page:A Companion and Useful Guide to the Beauties of Scotland.djvu/317

Rh, however, were just as the poet described; "All as pure as Heaven at first dispos'd."

The present worthy chief has since begun a house on the same site; and I am persuaded, he has too much taste to destroy, by modern antics, the chaste, the enchanting simplicity, his ancestor has so well described; in whose steps, in point of celibacy, though not in politics, he strictly treads; so that the whole inscription too may be restored, and placed on the present Strowan's gate, which ornament the poet's portal.

Not half a mile below Mount Alexander, is the famous fall of the Tumel river; its noise is heard at a great distance; and it is a stop to the salmon, it being far too high for them to leap. It must be full forty feet high. It is not, to be sure, so lofty as many other falls in Scotland; but few equal it in majestic grandeur, at the time of a great flood; not only on account of the rise of the river, and the prodigious body of water in it, but chiefly for the wild appearance it exhibits, when dashing furiously in all the different forms that can be imagined, over the huge and irregular rocks at the cataract.

There is a very curious well at Mount Alexander, called the Silver Well, from the bright