62 ANGLING SKETCHES 



travels there, and told to me some years ago. The 

 details have escaped my memory, but, as Mr. 

 Stevenson narrated them, they rivalled De Quin- 

 cey's awful story of Williams's murders in the 

 Ratcliffe Highway. 



Life must still be haunted in Badenoch, as it 

 was on Ida's hill, by forms of unearthly beauty, the 

 goddess or the ghost yet wooing the shepherd ; 

 indeed, the boatman told me many stories of living 

 superstition and terrors of the night ; but wh}' 

 should I exhaust his wallet ? To be sure, it seemed 

 very full of tales ; these offered here may be but the 

 legends which came first to his hand. The boat- 

 man is not himself a believer in the fairy world, or 

 not more than all sensible men ought to be. The 

 supernatural is too pleasant a thing for us to 

 discard in an earnest, scientific manner like Mr. 

 Kipling's Aurelian McGubben. Perhaps I am 

 more superstitious than the boatman, and the yarns 

 I swopped with him about ghosts I have met 

 would seem even more mendacious to possessors of 

 pocket microscopes and of the modern spirit. But 

 I would rather have one banshee story than fifteen 



