328 NETHER LOCHABER. 



detect a perverseness of disposition and a thrawnness of temper that 

 you cannot believe to be temporary or accidental, but a veritable 

 part and portion of the man's being from the first. The old 

 dictum about the poet, which after all is only true in a sense, is 

 true of the grumbler absolutely. OrumMerus nascitur, non fit ; 

 he was born a grumbler, and if you put his mother in the witness 

 box, and she chose to entertain you with reminiscences of his 

 infancy, her testimony, we venture to say, would go to show that 

 he kicked and screamed at existence and all the surroundings of 

 his nursery at the earliest moment possible for such an exhibition, 

 and that this disposition to hit out right and left indiscriminately 

 at every one and everything, grew with his growth and strengthened 

 with his strength, till in fulness of time he became the thorough- 

 bred grumbler who sat opposite you at the tahle d'hote a week ago, 

 or rode with you atop of the coach yesterday. "With spur on heel, 

 and once fairly in the stirrups, your grumbler is ready to tilt, in 

 dearth of anything more substantial, at his own shadow. Any 

 attempt to mollify him, however well-meant and carefully worded, 

 only makes him worse. Do what you can, he remains a grumbler 

 still — implacable, unappeasable. As we generally meet with him 

 ,here, his grievances for the most part are as to the steamer or 

 coach by which he has travelled, and the food that he has had to 

 eat. Try to put him right according to your view of it, and you 

 are sure to catch it hot and heavy for your interference in a matter 

 which he declares concerns liirn alone, and yet with which he has 

 been pestering everybody that would for a moment listen to him 

 all the way from Oban to Staffa, or from BaUachulish to Tyndrum. 

 Give a man of this kind the softest cushion in the coziest corner of 

 Cleopatra's barge ; the box seat ui the victor's own chariot in a 

 triumphal procession ; a first and full supply of all the delicacies at 

 the table of Apicius of De r& CuUnaria fame, and he would still be 

 the same fault-finder and grumbler. One way of shutting up the 



