242 FISHING GOSSIP. 



into a tradition of actual events, having some undoubt- 

 ing believers and many unhesitating narrators. When 

 the angler leaves the hotel in the morning to go to the 

 loch, he goes through the same scene, and ought to ex- 

 perience the same sensations, as Francis Osbaldistone, 

 when, as a prisoner to Captain Thornton, he passed 

 the Highland line and entered Eob Koy's country : 



" Our road continued to be, if possible, more waste and 

 wild than that we had travelled in the forenoon. The few 

 miserable hovels that shewed some marks of human habita- 

 tion, were now of still rarer occurrence ; and at length, as we 

 began to ascend an uninterrupted swell of moorland, they 

 totally disappeared. The only exercise which my imagina- 

 tion received was, when some particular turn of the road gave 

 us a partial view, to the left, of a large assemblage of dark- 

 blue mountains stretching to the north and north-west, which 

 promised to include within their recesses a country as wild 

 perhaps, but certainly differing greatly in point of interest 

 from that in which we now travelled. The peaks of this 

 screen of mountains were as widely varied and distinguished 

 as the hills which we had seen on the right were tame and 

 lumpish ; and while I gazed on this alpine region, I felt a 

 longing to explore its recesses, though accompanied with toil 

 and danger, similar to that which a sailor feels, when he 

 wishes for the risks and animation of a battle or a gale, in 

 exchange for the unsupportable monotony of a protracted calm. 

 I made various inquiries of my friend Mr. Jarvie, respecting 

 the names and positions of these remarkable mountains ; but 

 it was a subject on which he had no information, or did not 

 choose to be communicative. ' They're the Hit-land hills 

 the Hieland hills Yell see and hear eneugh about them 

 before ye see Glasgow Cross again.' " 



