10 WILD SPORTS OF THE HIGHLANDS. [CHAP. i. 



the fish, and arranged them in rows to admire their beauty and 

 size, the little captain (as the other men called him) subsided into 

 a good-humoured calm ; and having offered a pinch of snuff to the 

 gamekeeper, whom he generally fixed upon in particular to shout 

 at, in consequence of a kind of rivalry between them, and also in 

 consequence of his measuring some head and shoulders higher 

 than himself, he made a brief apology for what he had said, wind- 

 ing it up by saying, " And after all, that 's no so bad, your 

 Honour," as he pointed to some giant trout ; he then would light 

 a pipe, and having taken a few whiffs, deliberately shove it alight 

 into his waistcoat pocket, and extracting a netting-needle and 

 string, set to work, mending any hole that had been made in the 

 net. This done, and a dram of whisky having been passed round, 

 the net was arranged on the stern of the boat, and they rowed 

 round the wooded promontory to the other creek, keeping time 

 to their oars with some wild Gaelic song, with a chorus in which 

 they all joined, and the sound of which, as it came over the 

 water of the lake, and died gradually away as they rounded the 

 headland, had a most peculiarly romantic effect. 



Sometimes we did not commence our fishing till sunset, choos- 

 ing nights when the full moon gave us sufficient light for the 

 purpose. Our object in selecting this time was to catch the 

 larger pike, who during the day remained in the deep water, 

 coming in at night to the shore, and to the mouths of the burns 

 which run into the lake, where they found small trout and other 

 food brought down by the streams. During the night time, also, 

 towards the beginning of autumn, we used to catch quantities of 

 char, which fish then, and then only, approached near enough to 

 the shore to be caught in the nets. In the clear frosty air of a 

 September night the peculiar moaning cry of the wild cats as 

 they answered to each other along the opposite shore, and the 

 hootings of the owls in the pine-wood, sounded like the voices of 

 unearthly beings, and I do not think that any one of my crew 

 would have passed an hour alone by that loch side for all the 

 fish in it. Indeed, the hill side which sloped down to the lake 

 had the name of being haunted, and the waters of the lake itself 

 had their ghostly inhabitant in the shape of what the Highlanders 

 called the water -bull. There was also a story of some strange 

 mermaid-like monster being sometimes seen, having the appear 



