enjoyments at this time to bathe, as the
sun was sinking behind the woods, in the deeper pools of the Conon--a
pleasure which, like all the more exciting pleasures of youth, bordered
on terror. Like that of the poet, when he "wantoned with the breakers,"
and the "freshening sea made them a terror," "'twas a pleasing fear."
But it was not current nor freshening eddy that rendered it such: I had
acquired, long before, a complete mastery over all my motions in the
water, and, setting out from the shores of the Bay of Cromarty, have
swam round vessels in the roadstead, when, among the many boys of a
seaport town, not more than one or two would venture to accompany me;
but the poetic age is ever a credulous one, as certainly in individuals
as in nations: the old fears of the supernatural may be modified and
etherealized, but they continue to influence it; and at this period the
Conon still took its place among the haunted streams of Scotland. There
was not a river in the Highlands that used, ere the erection of the
stately bridge in our neighbourhood, to sport more wantonly with human
life--an evidence, the ethnographer might perhaps say, of its purely
Celtic origin; and as Superstition has her figures as certainly as
Poesy, the perils of a wild mountain-born stream, flowing between
thinly-inhabited banks, were personified in the beliefs of the people by
a frightful goblin, that took a malignant delight in luring into its
pools, or overpowering in its fords, the benighted traveller. Its
goblin, the "water-wraith," used to appear as a tall woman dressed in
green, but distinguished chiefly by her withered, meagre countenance,
ever distorted by a malignant scowl. I knew all the various
fords--always dangerous ones--where of old she used to start, it was
said, out of the river, before the terrified traveller, to point at him,
as in derision, with her skinny finger, or to beckon him invitingly on;
and I was shown the very tree to which a poor Highlander had clung,
when, in crossing the river by night, he was seized by the goblin, and
from which, despite of his utmost exertions, though assisted by a young
lad, his companion, he was dragged into the middle of the current,
where he perished. And when, in swimming at sunset over some dark pool,
where the eye failed to mark or the foot to sound the distant bottom,
the twig of some sunken bush or tree has struck against me as I passed,
I have felt, with sudden start, as if touched by the