164 SUMMER-TIDE IN A HIGHLAND FOREST 



— still I persevered, and towards sundown retreated, a 

 beaten man, vowing that never more should line of mine 

 be straightened over the Guseran till its waters had been 

 soundly exorcised. 



Salmon are intensely conservative : year after year the 

 great fish return to the same pools and streams which 

 sheltered their forefathers a thousand years ago. Often 

 the only favoured lodging in a mile of water consists of a 

 few square yards, the shelter of a submerged boulder, or 

 the shelf of a bank of glacial clay. Such fish haunts 

 invariably get specific names, some of them being ex- 

 ceedingly ancient with a pleasant measure of mystery 

 about them. Sometimes the meaning is quite obvious : 

 for example, there are very few Scottish salmon-rivers 

 without a cast called the Corbies or the Gled's Nest 

 (there are at least three ' Corbies ' on the Tweed, although 

 it is many, many years since the raven was suifered to 

 breed on that fair stream). More often the meaning is 

 more obscure — the Cradle, for instance, of which there are 

 two on the Tweed, and many elsewhere. Often these 

 names commemorate animals, and even races of men, long 

 since passed away. 



It is not always that one can read the riddle of 

 these ancient water-names. In Scotland, at least, where 

 Gaelic was not a written speech before the sixteenth 

 century, all that remains of them is their sound on the 

 lips of the peasantry and the rude attempts at phonetic 

 rendering thereof in Latin or English charters. But 

 Ireland had a copious Gaelic literature in very early 

 times, by means whereof one is sometimes able to detect 

 a different significance in names which have received 

 identical spelling at the hands of modern scribes. Thus 



