“Ah’m thinkin’ the gentleman micht find a coomfortaible lodgin’ wi’ the weedow Macphairson a wee bittie doon the road.  Her dochter is awa’ in Ameriky, an’ the room is a verra fine room, an’ it is a peety to hae it stannin’ idle, an’ ye wudna mind the few steps to and fro tae yir meals here, sir, wud ye?  An’ if ye ‘ill gang wi’ me efter dinner, ’a ’ll be prood to shoo ye the hoose.”

So, after a good dinner with the English fishermen, Sandy piloted me down the road through the thickening dusk.  I remember a hoodie crow flew close behind us with a choking, ghostly cough that startled me.  The Macpherson cottage was a snug little house of stone, with fuchsias and roses growing in the front yard:  and the widow was a douce old lady, with a face like a winter apple in the month of April, wrinkled, but still rosy.  She was a little doubtful about entertaining strangers, but when she heard I was from America she opened the doors of her house and her heart.  And when, by a subtle cross examination that would have been a credit to the wife of a Connecticut deacon, she discovered the fact that her lodger was a minister, she did two things, with equal and immediate fervour; she brought out the big Bible and asked him to conduct evening worship, and she produced a bottle of old Glenlivet and begged him to “guard against takkin’ cauld by takkin’ a glass of speerits.”

It was a very pleasant fortnight at Melvich.  Mistress Macpherson was so motherly that “takkin’ cauld” was reduced to a permanent impossibility.  The other men at the inn proved to be very companionable fellows, quite different from the monsters of insolence that my anger had imagined in the moment of disappointment.  The shooting party kept the table abundantly supplied with grouse and hares and highland venison; and there was a piper to march up and down before the window and play while we ate dinner—­a very complimentary and disquieting performance.  But there are many occasions in life when pride can be entertained only at the expense of comfort.

Of course Sandy was my gillie.  It was a fine sight to see him exhibiting the tiny American trout-rod, tied with silk ribbons in its delicate case, to the other gillies and exulting over them.  Every morning he would lead me away through the heather to some lonely loch on the shoulders of the hills, from which we could look down upon the Northern Sea and the blue Orkney Isles far away across the Pentland Firth.  Sometimes we would find a loch with a boat on it, and drift up and down, casting along the shores.  Sometimes, in spite of Sandy’s confident predictions, no boat could be found, and then I must put on the Mackintosh trousers and wade out over my hips into the water, and circumambulate the pond, throwing the flies as far as possible toward the middle, and feeling my way carefully along the bottom with the long net-handle, while Sandy danced on the bank in an agony of apprehension lest his Predestinated Opportunity should step into a deep hole and be drowned.  It was a curious fact in natural history that on the lochs with boats the trout were in the shallow water, but in the boatless lochs they were away out in the depths.  “Juist the total depraivity o’ troots,” said Sandy, “an’ terrible fateegin’.”