One of the party took his fly-rod and strolled leisurely 

 round to the farther side. Idly we watched the flash of 

 his line, and the ripple of his flies, and now and then 

 the splash and glitter as he drew a fish ashore. Then, as 

 he got too far for us to watch his movements, silence 

 settled down upon the lake a pleasant, dreamlike quiet, 

 for to us, after all our fighting with the wind and 



wave 



" Most weary seemed the sea, weary the oar, 

 Weary the wandering fields of barren foam. " 



A strange figure moving now and then among the 

 bracken might be one of those very figures seen by the 

 weary mariner "between the green brink and the running 

 foam." But no, it is only the bent form of an old woman 

 toiling along with a basket at her back, and matching so 

 exactly the tone of the sad-coloured mountains that the 

 eye can scarcely follow her as she creeps along among 

 the peat stacks. 



She meets the angler, now on his return from a none 

 too-successful foray. We can see her gesticulating, we 

 can even hear across the water the murmur of her voice. 

 She was addressing him, as we afterwards found, in most 

 voluble Gaelic, but the only word he felt quite sure of 

 was her parting " Blessing." 



There was no Gaelic scholar in our company. With 

 great difficulty we had mastered the equivalents for 

 Good Morning, and It's a wet day ; fine weather being 

 so scarce that we did not think it worth while to load 

 our memories with any reference to that. 



The two ambitions of our skipper, as he once confided 



