AN INTERCEPTED LETTER. 175 



fishing basket, and there is a vast amount of impatience 

 manifested, and a good deal of unparliamentary language 

 launched at him, until it is discovered behind the door, 

 and finally they are off — men, rods, gillie, and baskets, 

 and I am left behind "apart, unfriended, melancholy, slow" 

 for the next ten hours. And this is " going for a holiday ! " 



My first work invariably is to tidy the room, for it is 

 left in a perfect chaos. Slippers lie promiscuously over 

 the floor, tops of rods litter the little table, and discarded 

 pipe-cases choke the mantel-shelf; the table-cloth is awry; 

 every antimaccassar is pounded into a cotton lump : 

 reels are legion and are as great a plague as Pharoah's 

 frogs, for there are reels in the bed-chamber; and tobacco 

 is sown broadcast ! The piano is the general receptacle 

 for all the odds and ends that cannot find a resting-place 

 elsewhere, and at this moment it has lying upon it two 

 rod tops, a reel, a Scotch bonnet, a tobacco pouch, a 

 biscuit, a box of phantom minnows, a ball of string, 

 half a newspaper, two time-tables, a pencil, a photo- 

 graphic lens, a novel, a pipe case, a broken match box, 

 and a packet of tobacco. The piano also forms the 

 favourite roosting place for the latest brood of chickens 

 belonging to the establishment. I came in the other 

 morning and found six or eight of them picking up a 

 precarious livelihood from the floor. To judge from the 

 dignified manner in which they walked out, it was / who 

 was the intruder, and not they. 



The prospect out of doors is far from inviting. The 

 rain is coming down steadily, and a Scotch mist is slowly 

 blotting out the landscape. The loch is lost in vapour. 



