“Let us go up the canal, then,” said papa, whom his host had already taken there, to show him a very curious feature of the loch.
Leading out of one end of it, and communicating between it and a stream that fed it from the neighbouring glen, was a channel, called “the canal.” Unlike most Highland streams, it was as still as a canal; only it was natural, not artificial. Its depth was so great, that a stick fifteen feet long failed to find the bottom, which, nevertheless, from the exceeding clearness of the water, could be seen quite plain, with the fishes swimming about, and the pebbles, stones, or roots of trees too heavy to float, lying as they had lain, undisturbed, year after year. The banks, instead of shallowing off, went sheer down, as deep as in the middle, so that you could paddle close under the trees that fringed them,—gnarled old oaks, queerly twisted rowans or beeches, and nut-trees with trunks so thick and branches so wide-spreading, that the great-great-grandfathers of the glen must have gone nutting there generations back.
Yet this year they were as full as ever of nuts, the gathering of which frightened mamma nearly as much as the water-lilies. For papa, growing quite excited, would stand up in the boat and pluck at the branches, and would not see that nutting on dry land, and nutting in a boat over fifteen or twenty feet of water, were two very different things. Even the little girl, imitating her elders, made wild snatches at the branches, and it was the greatest relief to mamma’s mind when Sunny turned her attention to cracking her nuts, which her sharp little teeth did to perfection.
“Shall I give you one, mamma? Papa, too?” And she administered them by turns out of her mouth, which, if not the politest, was the most convenient way. At last she began singing a song to herself, “Three little nuts all together! three little nuts all together!” Looking into the little girl’s shut hands, mamma found—what she in all her long life had never found but once before, and that was many, many years ago—a triple nut,—a “lucky” nut; as great a rarity as a four-leaved shamrock.
“Oh, what a prize! will Sunny give it to mamma?” (which she did immediately). “And mamma will put it carefully by, and keep it for Sunny till she is grown a big girl.”
“Sunny is a big girl now; Sunny cracks nuts for papa and mamma.”
Nevertheless, mamma kept the triple nut, as she remembered her own mamma keeping the former one, when she herself was a little girl. When Sunny grows a woman, she will find both.
Besides nuts, there were here and there along the canal-side long trailing brambles, with such huge blackberries on them,—blackberries that seem to take a malicious pleasure in growing where nobody can get at them. Nobody could gather them except out of a boat, and then with difficulty. The best of them had, after all, to be left to the birds.
Oh, what a place this canal must have been for birds in spring! What safe nests might be built in these overhanging trees! what ceaseless songs sung there from morning till night! Now, being September, there were almost none. Dead silence brooded over the sunshiny crags and the motionless loch. When, far up among the hills, there was heard the crack of a gun,—Maurice’s papa’s gun, for it could of course be no other,—the sound, echoed several times over, was quite startling. What had been shot,—a grouse, a snipe, a wild duck? Perhaps it was a roe-deer? Papa was all curiosity; but mamma, who dislikes shooting altogether, either of animals or men, and cannot endure the sight of a gun, even unloaded, was satisfied with hearing it at a distance, and counting its harmless echoes from mountain to mountain.
What mountains they were!—standing in a circle, gray, bare, silent, with their peaks far up into the sky. Some had been climbed by the gentlemen in this shooting-lodge or by Donald, the keeper, but it was hard work, and some had never been climbed at all. The clouds and mists floated over them, and sometimes, perhaps, a stray grouse, or capercailzie, or ptarmigan, paid them a visit, but that was all. They were too steep and bare even for the roe-deer. Yet, oh! how grand they looked, grand and calm, like great giants, whom nothing small and earthly could affect at all.