CHAPTER III 



TWO MONTHS AT SPEYSIDE 



Some few years ago a bright April morning saw two friends 

 detrain at a small station on the Speyside railway. 



Two sturdy gillies with a barrow apiece were in waiting on 

 the platform, to wheel the baggage of the new arrivals piece by 

 piece to a pretty cottage hard by. As the men handled the 

 portmanteaus, it was easy to see some were marked in big 

 red letters C. O., while others were distinguished by R. P. in 

 equally large white characters. It will be as well at once to 

 state these letters stood respectively for Charles Onions and 

 Richard Pork, and by the latter this history is related. Charles 

 Onions (known to his intimates as " Violets ") had rented some 

 three miles of the Spey for a couple of months, and had bidden 

 me, his old friend Richard Pork, to come and help him coax the 

 salmon from the rocky pools of that magnificent river. 



The cottage in which we were able to take up our abode 

 was kept scrupulously clean and well ordered by two sisters. 

 Tall, thin, aged, dour and virgin Scotch "bodies" were the 

 Miss Monyplies. One was the cook, the other " the waitress," 

 while they were mutually assisted by a short, fat, dirty, red- 

 haired, unkempt, but ever-smiling lassie. 



The dress and manners, however, of the two Miss Monyplies 

 offered such a guarantee that all about them must needs be 

 respectable that we paid small heed to this young person's pecu- 

 liarities of raiment or appearance, while later on she herself by 

 the acuteness of her reasoning so thoroughly converted Onions 

 to the belief that the whole of her untidy and dirty appearance 

 1 6s 



