hootings had once perhaps been marketable. My shepherd's cottage
was four miles from the little-travelled road to Dalmellington; long bad
miles they were, across bog and heather. Consequently I seldom saw any
face of man, except in or about the cottage. My work went on rapidly
enough in such an undisturbed life. Empires might fall, parties might
break like bursting shells, and banks might break also: I plodded on with
my labour, and went a-fishing when the day promised well. There was a
hill loch (Loch Nan) about five miles away, which I favoured a good deal.
The trout were large and fair of flesh, and in proper weather they rose
pretty freely, and could be taken by an angler wading from the shore.
There was no boat. The wading, however, was difficult and dangerous,
owing to the boggy nature of the bottom, which quaked like a quicksand in
some places. The black water, never stirred by duck or moorhen, the dry
rustling reeds, the noisome smell of decaying vegetable-matter when you
stirred it up in wading, the occasional presence of a dead sheep by the
sullen margin of the tarn, were all opposed to cheerfulness. Still, the
fish were there, and the "lane," which sulkily glided from the loch
towards the distant river, contained some monsters, which took worm after
a flood. One misty morning, as I had just topped the low ridge from
which the loch became visible, I saw a man fishing from my favourite
bench. Never had I noticed a human being there before, and I was not
well pleased to think that some emissary of Mr. Watson Lyall was making
experiments in Loch Nan, and would describe it in "The Sportsman's
Guide." The mist blew white and thick for a minute or two over the loch-
side, as it often does at Loch Skene; so white and thick and sudden that
the bewildered angler there is apt to lose his way, and fall over the
precipice of the Grey Mare's Tail. When the curtain of cloud rose again,
the loch was lonely: the angler had disappeared. I went on rejoicing,
and made a pretty good basket, as the weather improved and grew warmer--a
change which gives an appetite to trout in some hill lochs. Among the
sands between the stones on the farther bank I found traces of the
angler's footsteps; he was not a phantom, at all events, for phantoms do
not wear heavily nailed boots, as he evidently did. The traces, which
were soon lost, of course, inclined me to think that he had retreated up
a narrow green burnside, with rather hi