OCT. OLD FLOUNDER -FISHER. 35 



seemed of a most bilious and irritable temperament; 

 and I believe had I not won him over by dint of 

 whisky and fair words, he would have laid his bad 

 success in flounder catching to my shooting wild- 

 fowl in the bay. As it was, he gradually became 

 tolerably gracious, and told me many marvellous 

 stories of the good old time, when salmon -fishers 

 were fewer and seals more plentiful ; so much so, 

 that, according to his account, every tide left num- 

 bers of these now rare animals in the pools of water 

 in the bay ; and a " puir man wha wanted a drop 

 oil or bit seal-skin had only to go down at low 

 water to the pools, and he could get a sealgh as 

 sune as I can get a fluke in these days." Since this 

 colloquy I and the old flounder-fisher have always 

 been on tolerable terms. 



The sea in this bay, as well as in other similar 

 ones on the coast, runs in so rapidly that, without 

 keeping a good look-out, there is a chance of 

 being surrounded by the water, and detained till 

 an hour or two after the tide begins to ebb again, 

 which in these short autumn days would be incon- 

 venient, as I am now at least six miles from home, 

 a great part of which distance is over the roughest 

 piece of moss and heather that I know, full, too, 

 of concealed holes treacherously covered over with 

 vegetation. 



