2/8 Notes on Sport and Travel i 



and the lassies used to live in sheilings and tend 

 them, — an arrangement which produced a great deal 

 of poetry and feeling, just as it does amongst the 

 ' Senn-Huterinn ' of the Tyrol to this day. The 

 cattle being teased with midges took to the lochs, 

 and stamped and plunged in the mud, turning out 

 all kinds of larvcB and affording a fine nidus for the 

 nidification of infinite beetles. Fine living there 

 was for the trout ; beetles in abundance, maggots 

 for the taking, and drowned flies in infinity. When 

 the wind was in the right airt and the planetary 

 aspects were in other respects benign, the plough- 

 woman dropped her cas-crom in the scratch that 

 did duty for a furrow, the turf-cutter left her divots 

 unturned, the piper left the last screech to be blown 

 out of his bag by atmospheric pressure, and all 

 rushed to Loch Beannach to catch trout. Unless 

 the old people romance, which very probably they 

 do, there used to be trouts enough taken in two or 

 three hours to keep the takers in fish for weeks. 

 To keep them, they merely split them and hung 

 them on the cabers of their wigwams, and the 

 creosote distilled from the peat soon rendered the 

 fish as safe from decay as it did the eaters of them. 

 I make this last comparison because certain learned 

 pundits have been lately poking about for a cause 

 for the increase of consumption among the northern 

 Highlanders, and they aver that it is the loss of the 

 peat-reek and its creosote, which now goes up the 

 grand stone chimney. However, old authors say 



