each
man makes his own food; but of course the more satisfactory plan is for
them to club together. Sometimes they get their food in the
farm-kitchen; but this is only when there are few of them and the
farmer and his family do not think it beneath them to dine with the
men. Broth, too, may be made in the kitchen and sent down to the
bothy. At harvest-time the workers take their food in the fields, when
great quantities of milk are provided. There is very little beer
drunk, and whisky is only consumed in privacy.

Life in the bothies is not, I should say, so lonely as life at the
schoolhouse, for the hands have at least each other's company. The
hawker visits them frequently still, though the itinerant tailor, once
a familiar figure, has almost vanished. Their great place of
congregating is still some country smiddy, which is also their frequent
meeting-place when bent on black-fishing. The flare of the
black-fisher's torch still attracts salmon to their death in the rivers
near Thrums; and you may hear in the glens on a dark night the rattle
of the spears on the wet stones. Twenty or thirty years ago, however,
the sport was much more common. After the farmer had gone to bed, some
half-dozen ploughmen and a few other poachers from Thrums would set out
for the meeting-place.

The smithy on these occasions must have been a weird sight; though one
did not mark that at the time. The poacher crept from the darkness.
into the glaring smithy light; for in country parts the anvil might
sometimes be heard clanging at all hours of the night. As a rule,
every face was blackened; and it was this, I suppose, rather than the
fact that dark nights were chosen that gave the gangs the name of
black-fishers. Other disguises were resorted to; one of the commonest
being to change clothes or to turn your corduroys outside in. The
country-folk of those days were more superstitious than they are now,
and it did not take much to turn the black-fishers back. There was not
a barn or byre in the district that had not its horseshoe over the
door. Another popular device for frightening away witches and fairies
was to hang bunches of garlic about the farms. I have known a
black-fishing expedition stopped because a "yellow yite," or
yellowhammer, hovered round the gang when they were setting out. Still
more ominous was the "peat" when it appeared with one or three
companions. An old rhyme about this bird runs--"One is joy, two is