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 Rob Roy’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 Hieland hills— 
the Hieland hills—Ye'll see and hear eneugh about them 
before ye see Glasgow Cross again.’” 
