OCT. OLD FLOUNDER FISHER. 35 



seemed of a most bilious and irritable temperament ; 

 and I believe had I not won him over by dint of 

 whisky and fair words, he would have laid his bad 

 success in flounder catching to my shooting wild 

 fowl in the bay. As it was, he gradually became 

 tolerably gracious, and told me many marvellous 

 stories of the good old time, when salmon fishers 

 were fewer and seals more plentiful ; so much so, 

 that, according to his account, every tide left num- 

 bers of these now rare animals in the pools of water 

 in the bay ; and a " puir man wha wanted a drop 

 oil or bit seal-skin had only to go dow^n at low 

 water to the pools, and he could get a sealgh as 

 sune as I can get a fluke in these days." Since this 

 colloquy I and the old flounder fisher have always 

 been on tolerable terms. 



The sea in this bay, as well as in other similar 

 ones on the coast, runs in so rapidly that without 

 keeping a good look-out, there is a chance of 

 being surrounded by the water, and detained till an 

 horn- or two after the tide begins to ebb again, 

 which in these short autumn days would be incon- 

 venient, as I am now at least six miles from home ; 

 a great part of which distance is over the roughest 

 piece of moss and heather that I know ; full, too, 

 of concealed holes, treacherously covered over with 

 vegetation. 



