AUGUST 187 



places. For it must be frankly admitted that angling 

 is so far a selfish pursuit that solitude, mitigated, it 

 may be, or even enhanced, by the presence of a choice 

 companion and a sagacious gillie, is indispensable to 

 the fisherman's felicity. 



Well, on the day in question nothing was wanting 

 in this respect. The scene was one of the vastest 

 solitudes in Scotland, empty of human cumber save 

 where the West Highland Railway trails its slender, 

 sinuous track across the Moor of Rannoch. On the 

 borders of that moor, and here and there upon its 

 expanse, gleam many, many lochs and tarns ; some of 

 them possessing high repute for the size and quality of 

 their trouts ; others peopled by innumerable small ones 

 which never exceed the dimensions of a gudgeon ; 

 others again, difficult of access and of unplumbed 

 depth, about which hang shadowy legends of enormous 

 trout landed by sportsmen of a bygone age. 



Most of these lochs, yea, even the smallest of them, 

 are distinguished by Gaelic polysyllables ; but the tarn 

 whereon I had set my desire was nameless, at least the 

 ordnance surveyors had not inscribed it with any title, 

 nor could I induce either host or gillie to invent one 

 for it. It attracted me more magnetically than other 

 and larger meres (its whole area does not exceed three 

 or four acres), because the evidence was tolerably con- 

 vincing that a four pound trout had actually been 

 taken from it within historic times. 



Only a small part of its surface can be commanded 

 from the shore, so wide and dense is the belt of reeds 

 surrounding it ; so my host undertook, in the face of 



