Note 12 — Chapter XIX

This portrait of the Ness is, I fear, scarce true to the ordinary character of the river. I had visited it during the previous winter, and walked a few miles along its sides, when the tract of country through which it flows lay bleached and verdureless, and steeped in the soaking rain of weeks, and the stream itself, big in flood, roared from bank to brae in its shallower reaches, or boiled sullen and turbid in many a circling eddy in its darker pools. And my description somewhat incongruously unites a sunlit summer landscape, rich in flower and foliage, with the brown wintry river.