60 FISH AND FISHING IN SCOTLAND. 



able, nor yet romantic ; without an Alpine character, you yet 

 look as if you had been, for ever and for ever, one of the founda- 

 tions of the earth ! 



I have angled now for half a century, yet nature seems to me 

 for ever the same; nor time nor circumstance, science nor 

 philosophy, have ever affected my love of nature ; to efface it 

 seems impossible. All may be vanity and vexation of spirit 

 with those over whose minds conventionalism holds its nickering, 

 trifling, soul-destroying, levelling sway; but all is not vanity 

 with me. The fibre touched by the absolutely true, the perfect, 

 the beautiful, the universal, is still as fresh as when a boy I 

 wandered by the banks of the Whitwater, or climbing desolate 

 Minch Moor first caught sight of Yarrow's flooded stream, 

 or roamed by the banks of the Seine, or gazed listlessly 

 from the slopes of the Anatolo. Why should we weary or 

 become tired of nature? Is the sun less bright? Has the 

 mountain-top lost its aerial tints ? the moon her silvery lustre ? 

 the lake its molten glassy surface ? and should the work 

 before us be not of nature but of human hands, yet, absolutely 

 perfect and beautiful, does it sink into odious commonplace ? 

 Do we tire of gazing at the Venus, the Apollo, the Diana, the 

 Minerva? Never! What fills us with ennui, with satiety, is 

 the so-called nature of civilized man ; the nature as fashioned by 

 the citizen, the utilitarian, the man of the day. Everything 

 he does smacks of the shop, the counter, the banker's book, the 

 means and end. Poetasters, versifiers, colourists, men of dodges 

 and tricks ! your clumsy deceptions will pass away whether 

 attempted on canvas, in marble, in gardening, in architecture ; 

 it will all pass away like yourselves ; but Nature, ever young, ever 

 fresh, ever beautiful, will still remain, and with her those 

 immortal names who have seen her face to face. The Cena of 

 Leonardo will never pall on human minds. 



I had brought my angler to Carsphairn ; a well made carriage- 

 road led thence to the high grounds overlooking the Loch of 

 Ken. We visited not its immediate banks, but journeying 

 onwards, gained the point where a ferry pointed out to us 

 the necessity of deciding on our future course. Two roads lay 

 before us ; by crossing the ferry we might shorten our route to 



