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242 It is not with accounts of funerals that I must take my leave of a place where I spent so pleasant a day, and had so hospitable a reception. Here I saw not only the dead past but a vigorous and hopeful present. Even the old Laird, we are told, "was a very hearty and hospitable landlord," though with his belief in his rights of furca et fossa he certainly was an antediluvian. His descendant does not yield to him in heartiness and hospitality, but has other ways of guiding his people than gallows, pit and dungeon. By his schools, his reading-room, his infirmary and his schemes for developing the fisheries he has won their affections. An old lady who had been allowed to visit the Castle, meeting him by chance as she came out, full of anger at what she had seen, exclaimed: "You ought, Sir, to be ashamed of your ancestors." "No," he replied, "I am not ashamed of them. They led their lives, and I lead mine." They were at all events as good as the men of their time, perhaps better. Old Lochbuy does not seem to have been a bad fellow, though he was slow in learning that he had lost his right to imprison his tenants. "May not a man do what he likes with his own?" we can fancy him asking in the words used more than seventy years later by an English duke. Much as his descendant has done, there is one thing more which I would ask him to do. He dreads, no doubt, the throng of noisy tourists, but he might surely build a modest inn where the pensive wanderer could find lodging, and enjoy the scenery of Lochbuy.

"The guiltless eye Commits no wrong, nor wastes what it enjoys."

On the morning of Friday, October 22, our travellers set out for the ferry by which they were to cross to Oban a distance of about twelve miles. According to Dr. Garnett, travellers were conveyed first to Kerrera, an island lying off the mainland. Crossing this on foot or horseback they found awaiting them another boat to take them to Oban. At Auchnacraig in Mull there was an inn about half a mile from the ferry. Here he and his companion could procure, he says, neither oats for their horses nor straw for their litter. They wanted to give them a mess of oatmeal and water, but the woman, who acted as hostler, at first refused, "asking whether