292 LOCH CRERAN. 



Loch Etive has actually smiled upon us, and enabled 

 us to probe its secrets peacefully then, you ask. Of 

 course at least it blew a little, you know, and you 

 need not tell anybody that the net we sunk with the 

 dredge rope attached to it as a buoy, has heard of 

 Manitoba and the North-West and gone in for emigration ! 

 Perhaps we will be able to tell you in our next if there 

 are any fish in Etive, like the farmer from our side who 

 set his herring-net opposite Achnacree and found it a 

 day or two after at Island Ferry. " No herring in the 

 loch," was the sententious remark ; " my net has swept 

 the whole of it and did not get a fish!" Loch Etive, 

 you see, is of a lively turn, and its terrific currents have 

 their own ideas as to where a net should be cast ! 



There has been an exceptionally rich show of marine 

 worms of late on the foreshores, and only those who have 

 the courage to inquire into this peculiar class of life can 

 have any idea of the beauty to which it can attain. Turn- 

 ing up a large stone at low water, we came upon a wriggl- 

 ing mass of iridescence, blue and green struggling for the 

 mastery in the display, and the play of colour of the opal 

 glancing along its shimmering rings, Polynoe viridis. Each 

 side showed a row of what could only be termed bangles, 

 resembling nothing so much as the glancing plates so 

 freely employed in a pantomime; and the whole squirming 

 mass would naturally have been taken for a colony of 

 beautifully-coloured marine creatures of an elongate form. 

 A point of a stick inserted into the mass finds a place of 

 support for a portion of the creature, and as we lift it up 

 the extraordinary colony gradually develops before our 

 eyes into one single worm upwards of four feet in length. 

 But it has been slightly injured from bearing its whole 

 weight on one part of its slippery body, and when placed 



