med sprinkled with an
infinity of points of silver, that for an instant glittered to the
sun, and then resigned their places to other quick glancing points,
that in turn were succeeded by yet others. The herrings by
millions, and thousands of millions, were at play around us,
leaping a few inches into the air, and then falling and
disappearing, to rise and leap again. Shoal rose beyond shoal, till
the whole bank of Gulliam seemed beaten into foam, and the low
poppling sounds were multiplied into a roar, like that of the wind
through some tall wood, that might be heard in the calm for miles.
And again, the shoals extending around us seemed to cover, for
hundreds of square miles, the vast Moray Firth. But though they
played beside our buoys by thousands, not a herring swam so low as
the upper baulk of our drift. One of the fishermen took up a stone,
and, flinging it right over our second buoy into the middle of the
shoal, the fish disappeared from the surface for several fathoms
around. 'Ah, there they go,' he exclaimed, 'if they go but low
enough. Four years ago I startled thirty barrels of light fish into
my drift just by throwing a stone among them.' I know not what
effect the stone might have had on this occasion; but on hauling
our nets for the third and last time, we found we had captured
about eight barrels of fish; and then hoisting sail--for a light
breeze from the east had sprung up--we made for the shore with a
cargo of twenty barrels."

Meanwhile the newspaper critics of the south were giving expression to
all sorts of judgments on my verses. It was intimated in the title of
the volume that they had been "written in the leisure hours of a
journeyman mason;" and the intimation seemed to furnish most of my
reviewers with the proper cue for dealing with them. "The time has gone
by," said one, "when a literary mechanic used to be regarded as a
phenomenon: were a second Burns to spring up now, he would not be
entitled to so much praise as the first." "It is our duty to tell this
writer," said another, "that he will make more in a week by his trowel
than in half a century by his pen." "We are glad to understand," said a
third--very judiciously, however--"that our author has the good sense to
rely more on his chisel than on the Muses." The lessons taught were of a
sufficiently varied, but, on the whole