3-034-566 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

In the Highlands, 1871. Travelling to Scotland for the shooting season. 'Hey for Glasgow! and the mail-steamer Iona takes us, with a hundred others, the "Royal route" to the Western Highlands...Near the helmsman...is, as one may shrewdly guess by his talk, the owner or renter of a snug shooting-box...,attended by his fair daughter. He is longing to be at the grouse...[Hunting dogs] Ponto and Fritz, too, veterans in his service, are as eager as their master for the coming sport. Our fellow-passengers are of all kinds - artists, who will return with jammed portfolios; salmon-fishers;...youths, fresh from Cockneydom, who think to disguise themselves in Scottish garb, and contrive only to look very awkward; a Yankee, who has the candour to admit the beauty of the scene...the pair of lovers so snugly ensconced at our left...This motley crowd, of various tastes and conditions, held together for a while by one common desire to leave bricks-and-mortar far behind them, will soon be dispersed, each unit going its own way, until, refreshed and gladdened with their face-to-face intercourse with Nature, in some of her loveliest and grandest haunts, they gather again on the Iona's deck, on their return, newly-braced, to the wearing duties of town life'. From "Illustrated London News", 1871.