nd him lying cold and stiff,
with his face buried in the water of a small stone font. He had fallen,
apparently, in a fit, athwart the wall; and his predestined hour having
come, he was suffocated by the few pints of water in the projecting
font. At this time the stone font of the tradition--a rude trough,
little more than a foot in diameter either way--was still to be seen
among the ruins; and, like the veritable cannon in the Castle of
Udolpho, beside which, according to Annette, the ghost used to take its
stand, it imparted by its solid reality a degree of authenticity to the
story in this part of the country, which, if unfurnished with a "local
habitation," as in Sir Walter's note, it would have wanted. Such was one
of the many stories of the Conon with which I became acquainted at a
time when the beliefs they exemplified were by no means quite dead, and
of which I could think as tolerably serious realities, when, lying a-bed
all alone at midnight, the solitary inmate of a dreary barrack,
listening to the roar of the Conon.

Besides the long evenings, we had an hour to breakfast, and another to
dinner. Much of the breakfast hour was spent in cooking our food; but as
a bit of oaten cake and a draught of milk usually served us for the
mid-day meal, the greater part of the hour assigned to _it_ was
available for purposes of rest or amusement. And when the day was fine,
I used to spend it by the side of a mossy stream, within a few minutes'
walk of the work-shed, or in a neighbouring planting, beside a little
irregular lochan, fringed round with flags and rushes. The mossy stream,
black in its deeper pools, as if it were a rivulet of tar, contained a
good many trout, which had acquired a hue nearly as deep as its own, and
formed the very negroes of their race. They were usually of small
size--for the stream itself was small; and, though little countries
sometimes produce great men, little streams rarely produce great fish.
But on one occasion, towards the close of autumn, when a party of the
younger workmen set themselves, in a frolic, to sweep it with torch and
spear, they succeeded in capturing, in a dark alder-o'ershaded pool, a
monstrous individual, nearly three feet in length, and proportionally
bulky, with a snout bent over the lower jaw at its symphysis, like the
beak of a hawk, and as deeply tinged (though with more of brown in its
complexion) as the blackest coal-fish I ever saw. It must have been a
bull-trout,