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in my favour. In tossing the bar or throwing the stone, the competitor who begins with a rather indifferent cast is never very unfavourably judged if he immediately mend it by giving a better; and I resolved on mending my cast, if I could, by writing for the _Inverness Courier_--which was now open to me, through the kindness of the editor--a series of carefully prepared letters on some popular subject. In the days of Goldsmith, the herring-fishing employed, as he tells us in one of his essays, "all Grub Street." In the north of Scotland this fishery was a popular theme little more than twenty years ago. The welfare of whole communities depended in no slight degree on its success: it formed the basis of many a calculation, and the subject of many an investment; and it was all the more suitable for my purpose from the circumstance that there was no Grub Street in that part of the world to employ itself about it. It was, in at least all its better aspects, a fresh subject; and I deemed myself more thoroughly acquainted with it than at least most of the men who were skilful enough, as _litterateurs_, to communicate their knowledge in writing. I knew the peculiarities of fishermen as a class, and the effects of this special branch of their profession on their character: I had seen them pursuing their employments amid the sublime of nature, and had occasionally taken a share in their work; and, further, I was acquainted with not a few antique traditions of the fishermen of other ages, in which, as in the narratives of most seafaring men, there mingled with a certain amount of real incident, curious snatches of the supernatural. In short, the subject was one on which, as I knew a good deal regarding it that was not generally known, I was in some degree qualified to write; and so I occupied my leisure in casting my facts respecting it into a series of letters, of which the first appeared in the _Courier_ a fortnight after my volume of verse was laid on the tables of the north country booksellers. I had first gone out to sea to assist in catching herrings about ten years before; and I now described, in one of my letters, as truthfully as I could, those features of the scene to which I had been introduced on that occasion, which had struck me as novel and peculiar. And what had been strange to me proved equally so, I found, to the readers of the _Courier_. My letters attracted attention, and were republished in my behalf by the
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