“A fiery ettercap, a fractious chiel,
As het as ginger, and as stieve as steel!”
“And is ‘Speach’ good, then, Donald?” we inquired. “Yes, sir,” was the reply, “a very good little dog. He is but small, you see, and light; the smallest, indeed, at present in my pack, but he will take hold of fox or badger or otter at the readiest spot that offers, and, having once got hold, will never let go again while his antagonist is in life; at every dig only burying his muzzle deeper into his opponent.” We quite agreed with him that a dog that did that must be good indeed; and we are perfectly satisfied that he did not in the least exaggerate the indomitable pluck and never-say-die tenacity of his tiny favourite. Two very good things remain to be said in praise of our Highland fox-hunters’ dogs. They are never known to bite, and very rarely even to bark at human beings; and no fox-hunter’s dog was ever known to be affected with hydrophobia or canine madness. The exemption from canine madness may, perhaps, be largely due to their open air and natural mode of life, but it is difficult to understand why they should be so entirely free from any propensity to bite or otherwise annoy a human being, a vice common enough to dogs of unexceptionable character and breeding otherwise, and from which even the highly intelligent and much-lauded collie is by no means so free as his many admirers seem to suppose. Even a collie is always prepared to bark, and oftentimes to bite on very little provocation, or no provocation at all. The fox-hunter’s terrier, whether he is pure or a nondescript cross, very rarely indeed barks at a stranger, and never under any circumstances offers to bite. We question if there is a human being to-day in life who can honestly assert that he has ever been bitten by a fox-hunter’s dog. With Macdonald we had a long and interesting crack, in the course of which we touched on some matters of sufficient importance to be introduced to the reader on a future occasion.
We had also a visit some little time ago from Sandy Macarthur, a well-known mole-catcher in Lochaber and the neighbouring districts; a very intelligent and civil man, whose only fault is that when you have collared him there is no spontaneity in his crack. Even when you have got firm hold enough of him, you have to extract his frequently very valuable information from him by a process akin to that which an ingenious and learned counsel employs in the case of a recalcitrant and unwilling witness at an important jury trial. Sandy, however, is a good fellow all the same, slow but sure; and his quiet unobtrusiveness and reticence is perhaps to be attributed to the exigencies of his profession; a “rattling, roaring Willie” of a mole-catcher, with, to use a Gaelic phrase, his tongue constantly on his shoulder, would probably prove but an unsuccessful hunter of the velvet-coated quick-eared, and timid subterranean family of the Mac Talpa. Sandy, on the contrary, goes to work in dead silence and a-tiptoe, and bags his mole as quietly as an angler baskets his trout from out the glassy pool, over which, if but his shadow moved, he would angle long in vain. Sandy assures us that moles are to be found this season where they were never seen before, and where he was at first a good deal puzzled to account for their appearance. On a full consideration of the case Macarthur’s theory is briefly to this effect: Moles are mainly underground dwellers, and even their travelling and migrating from place to place are done subterraneously. If, however, they find themselves, as in the Highlands they must frequently do, in a district or part of district separated from other parts in which they have never been by rocky spurs and ridges, they will not venture over these latter unless they carry sufficient earth to hide their tunnelling, which, it is needless to say, they frequently do not. The mole in such a case remains insulated, a prisoner, so to speak, within his present domain. Last winter and spring, however, according to Sandy’s theory, the snow lay so deep and lay so long, that the moles took advantage of the fact, and making their tunnels under the snow, where it lay on spur and ridge, just as if it had been so much superincumbent soil, they easily got into fresh fields and pastures new. In this way alone can Sandy account for the appearance of moles this summer in places into which hitherto they had no means of ready access; and he may be right, though it is a point in the natural history of the Talpa well deserving further investigation. Sandy further avers that moles sometimes swim across rivers, fresh-water lakes, and even arms of the sea in their migrations; and this is just possible, though we took the liberty of expressing ourselves slightly incredulous. Sandy, however, ought to know; he has spent the best part of a life already approaching its grand climacteric in the careful and close and constant study of, as one may say, a single animal—to wit, the mole—and it is always hazardous gravely to doubt or contradict the deliberately expressed opinion of such a man on a matter strictly within his proper province. All the same we still venture to question the assertion that the mole ever voluntarily enters water deep enough to swim in, or ever dims the velvety sheen of its glossy pile even by such a luxury as a voluntary bath in the shallows, till we have some stronger proof for it than has yet been adduced.
CHAPTER XLVII.
Autumnal Night—Meteors—The Spanish Mackerel—Professor Blackie’s Translations from the Gaelic—The “Translations” of the Gaelic Society of Inverness.
“On the Rialto, every night at twelve,
I take my evening’s walk of meditation.”
So says the love-sick knight in Venice Preserved. We have never, much as we should like it, had an opportunity of enjoying a Rialto midnight meditation ramble. There is poetry and romance in the very thought of it; but we know something more poetical and in every way better still, namely, a midnight meditative stroll along our own beautiful silvery sanded beach, what time the sea is so calm that its breathings are low and soft as the respirations of a child whose sleep is undisturbed save by angel-whispered dreams; the cloudless sky above, with its waning moon and thousands of sparkling stars, each star a living intelligence; its sparkling speech, and no sound to disturb the solemn silence, except now and again the wakeful sea-bird’s eerie scream, and the voice of many waters, as the mountain torrents leap adown their channels to the sea, a voice so mellowed by the distance that it becomes solemn and musical as the fast-falling concluding notes of a grand organ hymn—the Pentecostal “Veni, Creator Spiritus, for example. During the fine weather of this exceptionally fine season [August 1875] we have rarely gone to bed before midnight, more frequently, indeed, long after, and our last thing at night has been a sea-shore stroll, a half or quarter hour so thoroughly enjoyable that we have come to miss it sadly, if by adverse weather, absence from home, or any other cause, we are obliged to forego it. In addition to all the other attractions of a midnight sea-side stroll in such weather as the tropics themselves might be proud of, the reader must remember that August is one of our meteor months—the second week particularly being remarkable for the number and brilliancy of the Perseides, so called from their seeming mainly to radiate from the direction of the constellation Perseus. Never was there a finer season to observe them than this; and although they have, perhaps, been less numerous than usual, the brilliancy of many of them was so remarkable, and their paths throughout so easily followed, that their very infrequency only added to the eagerness and interest with which one watched and waited for them. The finest display of the season was from midnight on to nearly two A.M. on the night of the 11th and 12th, in which time we counted thirty-three noticeable meteors—of which seven were what might be called first-class meteors of a nucleus brilliancy equal to or exceeding that of first magnitude stars, with broad, bright, well-defined trains, that wholly or in part, in three or four instances, remained in sight, mapping out the meteor’s trajectory for several seconds after the disappearance or extinction of the parent orb or meteor proper itself. Mr. W. B. Symington, who was among the Hebrides at the time on a yachting cruise, writes on the subject as follows:—“Notwithstanding your injunction to be on the qui vive as to the August meteors, I am sorry to say that I forgot all about it on the nights of the 9th and 10th, although the weather was beautifully clear. On the 11th, 12th, and 13th, however, the sailing-master and myself were sharply on the look-out, and our watchfulness was rewarded by the sight of some really very splendid examples. There were on each night scores and scores of the more common, lesser, and fainter meteors, but our attention was of course principally directed to the more brilliant ones. Of these latter we had, during about an hour and a quarter’s observation, four very fine ones, with long bright tails, on the 11th; nine on the 12th; and one magnificent fellow, that lighted up the deck, sails, and rigging of the yacht with a strange greenish glare, on the 13th. This last was at 11.5 P.M. One of the men said that before daybreak on the 12th there were some very large and bright meteors. As far as my observations went, the course of these meteors seemed to be mainly to the west and south-west, although two at least of the larger ones rushed in a directly opposite path, namely, to east and north-east. As I am likely to be at sea in November, though in a very different kind of craft, I will endeavour to give you a more careful and satisfactory account of the meteor display of that month. I may tell you that one of the men caught a scad of large size, the biggest, I believe, I ever saw. It weighed nearly four pounds. I thought it not bad eating, though the rest of them in the cabin said it was coarse and tasteless. It was caught by a long line and herring baited hook, that was allowed to drag after the ship in a breeze that gave us at the time a speed of at least eight knots an hour.”