“Young man, do ye no ken it’s the Sawbath Day?”

I recognised the reproof of the righteous, an excellent oil which doth not break the head, and took it gratefully at the old man’s hands.  For did it not prove that he regarded me as a man and a brother, a creature capable of being civilised and saved?

It was in the gray town of Dingwall that I had this bit of pleasant correction, as I was on the way to a fishing tramp through Sutherlandshire.  This northwest corner of Great Britain is the best place in the whole island for a modest and impecunious angler.  There are, or there were a few years ago, wild lochs and streams which are still practically free, and a man who is content with small things can pick up some very pretty sport from the highland inns, and make a good basket of memorable experiences every week.

The inn at Lairg, overlooking the narrow waters of Loch Shin, was embowered in honeysuckles, and full of creature comfort.  But there were too many other men with rods there to suit my taste.  “The feesh in this loch,” said the boatman, “iss not so numerous ass the feeshermen, but more wise.  There iss not one of them that hass not felt the hook, and they know ferry well what side of the fly has the forkit tail.”

At Altnaharra, in the shadow of Ben Clebrig, there was a cozy little house with good fare, and abundant trout-fishing in Loch Naver and Loch Meadie.  It was there that I fell in with a wandering pearl-peddler who gathered his wares from the mussels in the moorland streams.  They were not of the finest quality, these Scotch pearls, but they had pretty, changeable colours of pink and blue upon them, like the iridescent light that plays over the heather in the long northern evenings.  I thought it must be a hard life for the man, wading day after day in the ice-cold water, and groping among the coggly, sliddery stones for the shellfish, and cracking open perhaps a thousand before he could find one pearl.  “Oh, yess,” said be, “and it iss not an easy life, and I am not saying that it will be so warm and dry ass liffing in a rich house.  But it iss the life that I am fit for, and I hef my own time and my thoughts to mysel’, and that is a ferry goot thing; and then, sir, I haf found the Pearl of Great Price, and I think upon that day and night.”

Under the black, shattered peaks of Ben Laoghal, where I saw an eagle poising day after day as if some invisible centripetal force bound him forever to that small circle of air, there was a loch with plenty of brown trout and a few salmo ferox; and down at Tongue there was a little river where the sea-trout sometimes come up with the tide.