murmuring from loch to
river, rush roaring through that rainbow-arch, and bathe the green woods
in freshening spray-mist through a loveliest landscape, that steals
along with its meadow-sprinkling trees close to the very shore of Loch
Etive, binding the two lochs together with a sylvan band--her whose
calmer spirit never knows the ebb or flow of tide, and her who
fluctuates even when the skies are still with the swelling and subsiding
tumult duly sent up into and recalled down from the silence of her
inland solitude. And now for one pool in that river, called by eminence
the Salmon Pool, whose gravelly depths are sometimes paved with the blue
backs of the silver-scaled shiners, all strong as sunbeams, for a while
reposing there, till the river shall blacken in its glee to the floods
falling in Glen-Scrae and Glenorchy, and then will they shoot through
the cataract--for 'tis all one fall between the lochs--passionate of the
sweet fresh waters in which the Abbey-Isle reflects her one ruined
tower, or Kilchurn, at all times dim or dark in the shadow of Cruachan,
see his grim turrets, momentarily less grim, imaged in the tremblings of
the casual sunshine. Sometimes they lie like stones, nor, unless you
stir them up with a long pole, will they stir in the gleam, more than if
they were shadows breathed from trees when all winds are dead. But at
other times, they are on feed; and then no sooner does the fly drop on
the water in its blue and yellow gaudiness (and oh! but the brown
mallard wing is bloody--bloody!) than some snout sucks it in--some snout
of some swine-necked shoulder-bender; and instantly--as by dexterously
dropping your elbow you give him the butt, and strike the barb through
his tongue--down the long reach of the river vista'd along that straight
oak-avenue--but with clear space of greensward between wood and
water--shoots the giant steel-stung in his fear, bounding blue-white
into the air, and then down into the liquid element with a plunge as of
a man, or rather a horse, till your heart leaps to your mouth, or, as
the Greeks we believe used to say, to your nose, and you are seen
galloping along the banks, by spectators in search of the picturesque,
and ignorant of angling, supposed in the act of making your escape, with
an incomprehensible weapon in both hands, from some rural madhouse.

Eh? eh? not in our hat--not in our waistcoat--not in our jacket--not in
our breeches! By the ghost of Autolycus some pickpoc