Volume 3 - Electric Scotland

RARRA.
BARKA, VATERSA, SOUTH UIST.
If you are wearied of rocks and lochs and islands
and waves, you must lay all the blame on the steam
eng-ine, not on your correspondent. I do not mean that
this writing-, replete with all manner of sapience and ad-
venture, was written by a steam engine; though if
mathematics and algebra can now be ground in a mill,
and equations and logarithms bolted out like bran, I do
not see why novels and travels, and much more, should
not also be manufactured by a forty horse power :
Swift's
machine was not quite visionary. What I do mean is
this; that as the essence of forty-horses, or of a whole
regiment of cavalry, can, in these days, be comprised in
a kettle and distilled, a man may now drive bis ship
and forty from Cantyre to St. Kilda, with the same
facility as he formerly drove his gig and one to Loch
Lomond ; and that too, without paying for those ruinous
Scottish turnpikes. Bishop Wilkins foresaw a day
coming when a man was to call for his wings instead of
his boots: but the Bishop did not foresee that, instead of
ordering his wings to be put on, or his horses to be put
to, the traveller will now shortly order the cook to boil
his kettle. Such is the efficient and real cause of at
least two of these very volumes: otherwise, I might as
well have directed travellers to the mountains of the
moon as to the mountains of Sky, and have described the
islands and bays in the Mare hyperboreum lunare. But
I see the day coming when, instead of Loch Cateran and
Aberfoyle^ it shall become the fashion to chase happi-
VOL. III. B