I24i FISH AND FISHING IN SCOTLAND. 



covered with the bush which clothes most of the hills and banks 

 of the rivers in Southern Africa : a bush terrible to behold 

 dark, melancholy, and full of painful recollections. On the slopes 

 of these hills, I saw at once a troop of wild elephants of at least 

 a hundred, young and old, peacefully grazing as they travelled 

 along, probably towards the bush of the Great Fish River. I 

 took infinite pains to point them out to my friend C , a quick- 

 sighted, dark-eyed Celt, and to the detachment he commanded, 

 but all in vain : they could not see one. 



The detachment being on foot, with the exception of C 



and myself, we left them where we halted, and rode gently 

 towards the elephants, and had come within half a mile, when 

 all at once he saw that what he had supposed to be the naked 

 red clay patches of the hill, intermingled with the bush, was a 

 vast troop of the greatest of all Nature's terrestrial quadrupeds. 



Mentioning the circumstance many years afterwards to my 

 most esteemed friend, Dr. Brewster, he assured me that the same 

 thing had happened to himself. An object was placed under the 

 microscope by Sir J. Herschell, and although he did his best to 

 see it, he did not succeed, until Sir John showed him how to look 

 for it. 



That incomparable wit, John Barclay, used to illustrate the dif- 

 ficulty of being unable to see what ought to be seen in a different 

 way. To one of his students, who could not see an object placed 

 before him, he remarked " It is no fault of mine, for as I know 

 it to be there you ought to see it." 



But if men are slow sometimes at seeing that which they 

 ought to see, they on other occasions are quick to discern that 

 which has no existence. They may move rapidly without con- 

 sciousness, believing all the while that they do not move at all ; 

 the consciousness of the action is overcome by a stronger con- 

 sciousness a belief strongest of all mental actions a belief. 



THE BLACKADDEE. 



The angler may fish the sources of the Blackadder near Whit- 

 burn, or in the middle of its course from Greenlaw to Dunse ; 

 either of these stations will be found convenient enough its 

 lower waters near Allanton, where it joins the "Whitadder. 



