98 SALMON AND TROUT. 
tor pike on Loch Lochy I saw the duck—an overgrown ‘ flapper’ 
—swimming not thirty yards from the boat. The idea occurred 
to me to try and cast over him, and after a few attempts 
I had the pleasure of seeing the bait settle gracefully across 
his neck. A ‘gentle stroak,’ as Nobbes calls it, and the next 
moment he dived, and, ‘playing’ like a veritable fish, never came 
to the top again till I had him at the side of the boat and 
passed the landing net under him. An hour afterwards he was 
roasting before: a drift-wood fire on a spit of arbutus; and 
washed down with a glass of genuine ‘ Long John’ he made a 
most excellent lunch. ‘These to his memory!’... 
It is wonderful what an appetite the air of a Highland 
Loch gives—a thing most excellent when one has the where- 
withal to satisfy it; but I often think it must be ‘ hard lines’ 
on the Gaelic tramps and gipsies—if there are any so far 
north of the country of ‘Meg Metrilies’ (Galloway). I once 
had myself the experience of a supperless tramp with a friend in 
these ‘high latitudes,’ and the recollection has by no means 
that ‘enchantment’ which ‘distance ’—we had covered some 
thirty miles of ground more or less—ought proverbially to lend. 
When it is getting dark and a man has distinctly lost his 
way in a country where there are no roads, and no visible 
population, it is the wisest plan to yield as gracefully as may be 
to the ‘ inevitable ;*and if he cannot, like Mark Tapley, be ‘jolly 
under circumstances,’ at least to do the best he can for his 
bodily comfort, without waiting till he has taken the last mile 
out of himself, and left his physique too much exhausted to 
contend on fair terms with damp grass and night dews. 
Acting on this view, we utilised our ‘last mile’ in ‘ pro- 
specting ’"—and eventually made ourselves a fairly comfortable 
shakedown of heather under the shelter of an overhanging 
rock—sub tegmine fern-i. But now we began to feel the air- 
effect upon our appetites, and to remember that we had been 
on the go since breakfast and had eaten nothing. We were in 
fact starving! A raw turnip would have been a godsend, and 
