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A little boy in twilight near Tarbet

Another three miles Dorothy and William had to walk along the banks of Loch Lomond before arriving in Tarbet, where they would spend the night. It was just getting dark and raining lightly, 'all was solitary and huge - sky, water, and mountains mingled together'.

While we were walking forward, the road leading us over the top of a brow, we stopped suddenly at the sound of a half articulate Gaelic hooting from the field close to us. It came from a little boy, whom we could see on the hill between us and the lake, wrapped up in a grey plaid. He was probably calling home the cattle for the night. His appearance was in the highest degree moving to the imagination: mists were on the hillsides, darkness shutting in upon the huge avenue of mountains, torrents roaring, no house in sight to which the child might belong; his dress, cry, and appearance all different from anything we had been accustomed to. It was a text, as William has since observed to me, containing in itself the whole history of the Highlander's life - his melancholy, his simplicity, his poverty, his superstition, and above all, that visionariness which results from a communion with the unworldliness of nature.

Recollections of Tour in Scotland, Sunday, 28 August 1803