Page:Footsteps of Dr. Johnson.djvu/322

254 they said, to have no new miles." The road was that at which Wolfe's men had been working twenty years earlier.

"He that has gained at length the wished for height," still finds as Wordsworth many years later found "this brief, this simple wayside call," Rest and be Thankful; but there is no longer a seat where his weary limbs may repose. Perhaps some day it will be restored with the old inscription and the following addition:—"James Wolfe, 1753. Samuel Johnson, 1773. William Wordsworth, 1831." It is on a mile-stone, or on what looks like a mile-stone, that the inscription is now read. Beneath is carved.

One of the earlier tablets, which were believed to have been put up by Wolfe's men, was pulled down many years ago by a farmer at Ardvoirlich, and transformed into a hearth stone. Glencroe is but little changed since Johnson looked upon it. It is still lonely and grand. The tourist's carriage breaks the quiet from time to time, but it soon sinks back into "sublimity, silence and solitude." When we passed through it there was no succession of cataracts and no roaring torrent such as Johnson described. The long drought had made a silence in the hills. We met only one tourist—a lad on his bicycle who had escaped that morning from the smoke of Glasgow, and full of eagerness and life, was pressing on to the inn where his long ride of fifty miles would find its pleasant termination in dinner and a bed. I called to mind how seven and thirty years before when I was just such another youngster, as I was crossing the top of the Glen, I had seen in the distance