rength of a whale and the agility of a flying-fish. He led
me rushing up and down the bank like a madman. He played on the surface
like a whirlwind, and sulked at the bottom like a stone. He meditated,
with ominous delay, in the middle of the deepest pool, and then, darting
across the river, flung himself clean out of water and landed far up on
the green turf of the opposite shore. My heart melted like a snowflake
in the sea, and I thought that I had lost him forever. But he rolled
quietly back into the water with the hook still set in his nose. A few
minutes afterwards I brought him within reach of the gaff, and my first
salmon was glittering on the grass beside me.

Then I remembered that William Black had described this very fish in
A Princess of Thule. I pulled the book from my pocket, and, lighting a
pipe, sat down to read that delightful chapter over again. The breeze
played softly down the valley. The warm sunlight was filled with the
musical hum of insects and the murmur of falling waters. I thought how
much pleasanter it would have been to learn salmon-fishing, as Black's
hero did, from the Maid of Borva, than from a red-headed gillie. But,
then, his salmon, after leaping across the stream, got away; whereas
mine was safe. A man cannot have everything in this world. I picked a
spray of rosy bell-heather from the bank of the river, and pressed it
between the leaves of the book in memory of Sheila.

II.

COMMON HEATHER.

It is not half as far from Albany to Aberdeen as it is from New York
to London. In fact, I venture to say that an American on foot will find
himself less a foreigner in Scotland than in any other country in
the Old World. There is something warm and hospitable--if he knew the
language well enough he would call it couthy--in the greeting that he
gets from the shepherd on the moor, and the conversation that he holds
with the farmer's wife in the stone cottage, where he stops to ask for a
drink of milk and a bit of oat-cake. He feels that there must be a drop
of Scotch somewhere in his mingled blood, or at least that the texture
of his thought and feelings has been partly woven on a Scottish
loom--perhaps the Shorter Catechism, or Robert Burns's poems, or the
romances of Sir Walter Scott. At all events, he is among a kindred and
comprehending people. They do not speak English in the same way that
he does--through the nose---but they think very much more in his mental
dialect than the English