nt convince this beetle-head that I was simply
speaking the barbarous accents of his native land!

Since which, after some similar experiments upon various peasants, &c.,
I have made a rather peculiar discovery.

There is no longer any such article as a separate Scottish language,
and, indeed, I am in some dubitation whether it ever existed at all, and
is not rather the waggish invention of certain audacious Scottishers,
who have taken advantage of the insular ignorance and credulity of the
British public to palm off upon it several highly fictitious kinds of
unintelligible gibberish!

Nay, I will even go farther and express a grave suspicion whether the
Scotland of these bookish romances is not the daring imposture of a _ben
trovato_. For, after a prolonged residence of over a fortnight, I have
never seen anything approaching a mountain pass, nor a dizzy crag,
surmounted by an eagle, nor any stag drinking itself full at eve among
the shady trunks of a deer-forest! I have never met a single mountaineer
in feminine bonnet and plumes and short petticoats, and pipes inserted
in a bag. Nor do the inhabitants dance in the street upon crossed
sword-blades--this is purely a London practice. Nor have I seen any
Caledonian snuffing his nostrils with tobacco from the discarded horn of
some ram.

Finding that my short kilt is no longer the mould of national form, I
have now altogether abandoned it, while retaining the fox-tailed
belly-purse on account of its convenience and handsome appearance.

Now let me proceed to narrate how I became the captor of a large-sized
salmon.

Having accepted the loan of Mister CRUM'S fishing-wand, and attached to
my line certain large flies, composed of black hairs, red worsted, and
gilded thread, which it seems the salmons prefer even to worms, I
sallied forth along the riparian bank of a river, and proceeded to whip
the stream with the severity of Emperor XERXES when engaged in
flagellating the ocean.

But waesucks! (to employ the perhaps spurious verbiage of aforesaid Poet
BURNS) my line, owing to superabundant longitude, did promptly become a
labyrinth of Gordian knots, and the flies (which are named _Zulus_)
attached their barbs to my cap and adjacent bushes with well-nigh
inextricable tenacity, until at length I had the bright idea to
abbreviate the line, so that I could dangle my bait a foot or two above
the surface of the water--where a salmon could easily obtain it by
simply turnin