380 NETHER LOCHABER. 



too, calm and glassy as a mirror. In the afternoon, however, we 

 were called out from the tea-table to look at a phenomenon which 

 had already attracted the attention of some of our more observant 

 neighbours, and about which they wanted our opinion, as they had 

 some thoughts of going a herring fishing. The phenomenon in 

 question was this : Not a breath of air was stirring, Loch Linnhe 

 was unruffled by the slightest zephyr, and yet a heavy surge quite 

 suddenly began to break along the beach with a sudden boom 

 that was remarkable in such a calm. A somewhat similar pheno- 

 menon, lasting but for a short time, however, is observed in our 

 lochs when, on a calm summer evening, one of the Messrs. Hutche- 

 son's paddle steamers the " Chevalier," for instance passes at full 

 speed close in shore. What could this swell and surge, troubling 

 a loch otherwise calm as a mill-pond, mean? You might have 

 safely carried a lighted candle exposed and lanternless along the 

 beach on which that heavy swell with hollow boom was breaking 

 breaking in great green waves that showed not a bell or fleck of 

 foam on their crests until they thundered on the shingle. It was, 

 in a word, a phenomenon for which there was no apparent adequate 

 cause. The sea, had it been in keeping with all its visible surround- 

 ings, should have been calm and still; on the contrary, it was restless 

 and perturbed, and there lay the mystery. Even had we recollected 

 nothing of the telegraphed storm, it was easy of solution, and our 

 instant interlocutor, as the law courts have it, was this : " A storm 

 in the Atlantic, my good friends. Calm as it is here, there is a 

 storm, and a wild one, depend upon it, outside yonder island of 

 Mull, for all it basks so peacefully in the golden sunset. Nothing 

 else can adequately account for such a swell on our calm inland 

 waters on an evening so summer-like and warm ; and when I tell 

 you that a storm likely to reach our shores to-morrow has been 

 telegraphed from America several days since, I conclude that it is 

 that very storm fast approaching us that causes this swell upon our 



