72 NETHER LOCHABER. 



ever in any form be a dish on a table at wliich we are seated, we 

 promise to give our share of it, totus, teres atque rotundus, whole and 

 unimpaired, to the first that will accept it. To the present intense 

 heat, coming so suddenly on the back of long-continued rains, is 

 probably due the extraordinary abundance of all kinds of fungL 



The shoal of whales at present disporting themselves in Lochiel, 

 intending probably, tourist fashion, to visit Inverness by-and-by, via 

 the Caledonian Canal, if they can onl;^ arrange it with the authorities, 

 did us the honour to visit Loch Leven, spending an entire day with us, 

 evidently very much to their -own satisfaction, if one might judge from 

 their lively somersaultings and incessant gamboULngs. These whales 

 — a shoal of some five or six hundred, we should say — were a very 

 interesting sight as they gambolled about within a hundred yards of 

 us, blowing loudly the while and lashing the sea with foam, until you 

 might have heard the hurly-burly from the top of the highest moun- 

 tain in the neighbourhood. They were of all sizes, from full growth, 

 and old age perhaps, down to veriest babyhood. In the shoal, two 

 kinds of whale were mingled together in apparent amity and good- 

 fellowship : the common bottlenose (Balcenoptera acuto-rostrata of 

 La Cfipede — the highest authority on cetaceous animals), measuring 

 some twenty or twenty-five feet in length, and the broad-nosed or 

 rorqual whale {Balcena musculus, Linn. ; B. rorqual, La CSpede), 

 from fifty to sixty feet in length, and appearing beside a bottlenose, 

 as they came to the surface to breathe, like a Clydesdale horse beside 

 a Shetland pony. It will be strange if our friends at Fort-"\ViUiani 

 do not manage to bag some of them ere they repass the narrows at 

 Corran Ferry. 



The heat is oppressive within doors ; but Loch Leven, wo observe, 

 is darkening under a rippling breeze from the south-east, and wo' 

 are off for a sail in our tidy, little craft, that, with lugsail sheeted 

 home, will go to windward of anything of equal size on the coast. 



