94 ANGLING Gf ART IN SCOTLAND 



as the short-cut to Inverness was then a scheme 

 of the future. 



Twenty years ago it was often a leisurely under- 

 taking travelling from Perth to Inverness, or vice 

 versa. I recall acutely one journey I had the mis- 

 fortune to make from the latter place to Blair 

 Atholl, by the train leaving Inverness at ten o'clock 

 in the evening. I was not deposited upon the 

 Blair Atholl platform until six o'clock on the 

 following morning, a matter of about a hundred 

 miles in distance. Many goods waggons entered 

 into the composition of the train, which stayed an 

 unearthly time at each place for shunting purposes. 

 Arrived at a station, the dead-calm after the racket 

 of running would let fall a veil of hasty sleep, 

 almost immediately to be torn ruthlessly aside 

 again by the train restarting — not restarting in a 

 sober, orderly manner, but by that exhilarating 

 process only known to the goods train, whose 

 component parts are not tightly coupled together. 

 Each separate item has to be picked up, so to speak, 

 with a violent clatter and jerk ; and no sooner has 

 the move been made than the human fiend in 

 control, in the shape of an engine-driver, must, for 

 some inscrutable reason, take it into his head to 



