lo WILD SPORTS OF THE HIGHLANDS. (CHAP, I. 
the fish, and arranged them in rows to admire their beauty and 
size, the little captain (as the other men called him) subsided into 
a good-humoured calm ; and having offered a pinch of snuff to the 
gamekeeper, whom he generally fixed upon in particular to shout 
at, in consequence of a kind of rivalry between them, and also in 
consequence of his measuring some head and shoulders higher 
than himself, he made a brief apology for what he had said, wind- 
ing it up by saying, “And after all, that’s no so bad, your 
Honour,” as he pointed to some giant trout ; he then would light 
a pipe, and having taken a few whiffs, deliberately shove it alight 
into his waistcoat pocket, and extracting a netting-needle and 
string, set to work, mending any hole that had been made in the 
net. This done, anda dram of whisky having been passed round, 
the net was arranged on the stern of the boat, and they rowed 
round the wooded promontory to the other creek, keeping time 
to their oars with some wild Gaelic song, with a chorus in which 
they all joined, and the sound of which, as it came over the 
water of the lake, and died gradually away as they rounded the 
headland, had a most peculiarly romantic effect. 
Sometimes we did not commence our fishing till sunset, choos- 
ing nights when the full moon gave us sufficient light for the 
purpose. Our object in selecting this time was to catch the 
larger pike, who during the day remained in the deep water, 
coming in at night to the shore, and to the mouths of the burns 
which run into the lake, where they found small trout and other 
food brought down by the streams. During the night time, also, 
towards the beginning of autumn, we used to catch quantities of 
char, which fish then, and then only, approached near enough to 
the shore to be caught in the nets. In the clear frosty air of a 
September night the peculiar moaning ery of the wild cats as 
they answered to each other along the opposite shore, and the 
hootings of the owls in the pine-wood, sounded like the voices of 
unearthly beings, and I do not think that any one of my crew 
would have passed an hour alone by that loch side for all the 
fish in it. Indeed, the hill side which sloped down to the lake 
had the name of being haunted, and the waters of the lake itself 
had their ghostly inhabitant in the shape of what the Highlanders 
called the water-bull. There was also a story of some strange 
mermaid-like monster being sometimes seen, having the appear- 
