who do not
pitch their hopes too high.

Loch Awe would have contented me less had I been less fortunate in my
boatman. It is often said that tradition has died out in the Highlands;
it is living yet.

After three days of north wind and failure, it occurred to me that my
boatman might know the local folklore--the fairy tales and traditions. As
a rule, tradition is a purely professional part of a guide's stock-in-
trade, but the angler who had my barque in his charge proved to be a
fresh fountain of legend. His own county is not Argyleshire, but
Inverness, and we did not deal much in local myth. True, he told me why
Loch Awe ceased--like the site of Sodom and Gomorrah--to be a cultivated
valley and became a lake, where the trout are small and, externally,
green.

"Loch Awe was once a fertile valley, and it belonged to an old dame. She
was called Dame Cruachan, the same as the hill, and she lived high up on
the hillside. Now there was a well on the hillside, and she was always
to cover up the well with a big stone before the sun set. But one day
she had been working in the valley and she was weary, and she sat down by
the path on her way home and fell asleep. And the sun had gone down
before she reached the well, and in the night the water broke out and
filled all the plain, and what was land is now water." This, then, was
the origin of Loch Awe. It is a little like the Australian account of
the Deluge. That calamity was produced by a man's showing a woman the
mystic turndun, a native sacred toy. Instantly water broke out of the
earth and drowned everybody.

This is merely a local legend, such as boatmen are expected to know. As
the green trout utterly declined to rise, I tried the boatman with the
Irish story of why the Gruagach Gaire left off laughing, and all about
the hare that came and defiled his table, as recited by Mr. Curtin in his
"Irish Legends" (Sampson, Low, & Co.). The boatman did not know this
fable, but he did know of a red deer that came and spoke to a gentleman.
This was a story from the Macpherson country. I give it first in the
boatman's words, and then we shall discuss the history of the legend as
known to Sir Walter Scott and James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd.

THE YARN OF THE BLACK OFFICER

"It was about 'the last Christmas of the hundred'--the end of last
century. They wanted men for the Black Watch (42nd Highlanders), and the
Black Officer, as they called him, was sent t