'Don't you call this a very ugly country?' Silverbridge asked as
soon as he arrived. Now it is the case that the traveller who
travels into Argyleshire, Perthshire, and Inverness, expects to
find lovely scenery; and it was also true that the country through
which they had passed for the last twenty miles had been not only
bleak and barren, but uninteresting and ugly. It was all rough
open moorland, never rising into mountains, and graced by no
running streams, by no forest scenery, almost by no foliage. The
lodge itself did indeed stand close upon a little river, and was
reached by a bridge that crossed it; but there was nothing pretty
either in the river or the bridge. It was a placid black little
streamlet, which in that portion of its course was hurried by no
steepness, had not broken rocks in its bed, no trees on its low
banks, and played none of those gambols which make running water
beautiful. The bridge was a simple low construction with a low
parapet, carrying an ordinary roadway up to the hall door. The
lodge itself was as ugly a house could be, white, of two stories,
with the door in the middle and windows on each side, with a slate
roof, and without a tree near it.
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