Bhogain ’rithisd ann e!”
Not very easily turned into English, but this is something like it—
“If my gudeman were cross and dour,
I’d dip him in the burn, O!
If my gudeman were cross and sour,
I’d dip him in the burn, O;
I’d dip the dear o’er head and ears until he’d grane and girn, O,
And till he promised better things, he’d get the tother turn, O.”
While stripping, it struck us that we were quite as wet on the occasion in question, as if for our sins we had undergone all the “dipping” threatened by the gudewife in the old reel; and the idea put us into good humour until tea and other fireside comforts made us forget all the pelting of the pitiless storm. How the remainder of winter and early spring may turn out meteorologically, it is impossible to forecast with any confidence, but meantime our old people, in their own opinion, at least, weatherwise and shrewd quoad hoc, are gravely shaking their heads over what they deem an unusual dearth of frost and snow in mid-winter.
Our West Coast storms, if in one sense sometimes disagreeable enough, rarely fail, however, to bring us a good thing in the shape of hundreds of tons of drift-ware, which, gathered and spread on the land, is found to be a valuable fertiliser. It is a labour, besides, which falls to be done in a season when there is little else to occupy the people’s time, and saves an immense deal of trouble when the spring comes round, for the land is ready for the plough and the immediate reception of the seed, whatever the crop—thus saving at once the manure heap for purposes in which farmyard manure is indispensable, and all the trouble of long cartage afield. In collecting his share of a huge swathe of this drift-ware the other day, one of our neighbours found a dead fish, quite fresh and unmutilated, which being new to him, though a fisherman and sea-shore man all his life, he thought might be interesting to us. He accordingly brought it to us, and to us also it was new, and as such, of course, exceedingly interesting. We puzzled long over it ere we satisfied ourselves that we had determined its identity. It was a small fish, some six inches in length, and of smelt-like shape and form and colouring, but it was not a smelt. After some little trouble, we finally decided that it was a species of atherine (Atherina) belonging to the Mugilidæ or mullet family. Our particular specimen was the Atherina presbyter, a not uncommon visitor on some of the south of England shores, but so rare in our seas that, as we have already said, we never saw a specimen before. We are told that the atherine is very good eating, and we can quite believe it, for it is a pretty, delicate-looking little fish, that, nicely fried until properly crimp and brown, ought to taste well. A much commoner fish, but interesting in this instance for the great size of the specimen, was an angler, fishing-frog, or sea-devil (Lophius piscatorius), which was cast ashore near Corran Ferry last week. This was the largest individual of the species—the ugliest, perhaps, of all fishes—that we ever saw. It measured five feet seven inches from snout to tip of tail, and weighed fifty-three pounds. It was poor and fleshless, and had died seemingly of sheer inanition or atrophy; had it been in full condition, it would have weighed a third more. Its terrible mouth, with its formidable array of sharp recurved teeth, was enough to scare a friend that accompanied us to a distance, though we assured him that the brute was dead and harmless. On opening out its jaws to a fair extent—that is, as far as we thought the animal itself would open them easily if need were, we placed a large turnip from a pit that was conveniently at hand, a turnip nearly as large as a man’s head, easily within the horrid cavern. We would willingly have taken this specimen home with us, for the purpose of preserving the skeleton, but we had no conveyance with us, and any idea of carrying it was out of the question. It had, besides, evidently lain some time on the beach, and its odour on moving it in the least was, the reader may believe, the very antipodes of Eau de Cologne or ottar of roses. We contented ourselves therefore with slitting open its stomach with our pocket-knife, and found it, as we expected, perfectly empty, containing nothing in the shape of food, except the tips of two claws and small bits of the carapace of a not uncommon species of crab, the velvet fiddler (Portunas puber). The Highlanders of the west coast and Hebrides call the angler Mac Làmhaich, properly Mac Làthaich—the son (that is, inhabitant) of the mud or ooze; a very expressive and appropriate name for it, for it is essentially a mud fish, in which, half buried and perdu, it hides and watches, tiger-like, for its prey. The naturalist meets with many things to puzzle him, and it has always puzzled us to account for the large size of this animal’s head and mouth, altogether disproportioned to the size of the rest of the body. No matter how insatiable the cravings of the brute’s maw—to use a Miltonic word—no matter how gluttonous soever of appetite, the head and mouth, and number and size of teeth, do seem unnecessarily formidable, monstrous indeed, for any conceivable work that they can be called upon to perform; and yet there is unquestionably good reason for it all, if we could only find it out. It may interest some of our readers to know that the sea-devil belongs, ichthyologically, to the Acanthopterygious family of fishes. Acanthopterygious! what a staggerer to any one except a learned ichthyologist at a Spelling Bee.