ON MOOR AND LOCH.
About eight o’clock of a June morning the train draws up at a small station within a short run south of the Scottish metropolis. It is not a typical June morning. There has been a fortnight’s drought, followed by two days of rain—the latter rejoicing the heart of the agriculturist and the angler; but yesternight the rain ceased, and its place has been taken by a gray mist, or haar, which the east wind is bringing up from the German Ocean. No angler loves mist. Is it not set down in the angler’s book of common-law precedents, that in the case of Man versus Trout, this obscure element is to be construed in favour of the defender? The station at which we alight is situated in an upland valley, shut in on the north and west by the mounded Pentlands; but this morning their outline shows only like a denser and darker bank of clouds in a gray waste of cloudland. Down into the valley also, thin streaks of mist are creeping dismally and slow, groping their way forward with long dripping fingers, like a belated band of midnight ghosts which the morning light has struck with sudden blindness. To the south-west, the Peeblesshire hills are less obscured, but there is floating over them the dull glaze, the leaden hue, which makes my companion sadly prognosticate thunder—and thunder to the angler’s sport is as fatal as mist.
It is indeed very far from being a typical June morning. The earth is gray, and the sky is gray; and the trees and hedgerows that flank the fields and overshadow the cottages and the little inn, are not musical with the song of any bird. There is even in the air a touch of the east wind, that fiend of the North Sea who comes to us annually with the crocus and the primrose, and spends at least three months of his baneful existence in tying innumerable knots upon human nerves. His sublime excellency the Sun is doubtless up, as his custom is, long ere now, but this morning he wilfully persists in keeping his chamber. All this is marked in the time we take to alight at the railway station, give up our tickets, and, shouldering basket and rod, set out towards our destination for the day, which lies over this long ridge to the right.
Everything is very still—with the soft stillness of a misty summer morning. Except for the noise of the train we have just left, as it goes coughing hysterically out of the station, one might almost hear the grass growing. The recent rain has washed the dust from leaf and flower, and the fields of young grain are in the reawakened freshness of early growth. The pastures have drunk in the moisture; and the cows that stop feeding for a moment to gaze on us with large soft eyes as we pass, return with fresh zest to their juicy morning meal. The watchdog at the farm salutes us, as is his wont, with a little gruff language; not meaning any great harm perhaps, but only in the way of duty. ‘You are not beggars,’ he seems to say, ‘and don’t want any strong measures to be taken with you. But you are strangers, and I dislike strangers. Don’t stand and look at me so, for that only irritates me. Good-morning, and be off with you!’ In a few minutes we reach the top of the ridge, and see the long line of the Moorfoot Hills girdling the south and east. They are much clearer than the Pentlands behind us, and we have hopes that a southerly breeze may spring up; for along the south-eastern horizon, between the hills and the low mist-cloud above, there is a clear line of light—the weather-gleam, as the Border shepherds poetically name it—showing where the wind is breaking through the haze and uncurtaining the hills.
Our road for three or four miles lies straight before us; for the most part, through a bleak barren moorland. The ditches at the sides, which serve to drain off the stagnating black bog-water, have an abundance of bright green mosses and water-plants on their shelving sides and marshy bottom. There is a broad waste of peat-moss all round, cracked and broken with black fissures, the higher patches covered with bent-grass, hard and wiry, brown and dry, and only here and there showing thin blades of green. One wonders what those straggling ewes find to eat amid the general barrenness, and how they manage to maintain themselves and their merry lambs, tiny, black-faced, and black-footed, that frolic around them. Yet this wild waste bears promise of beauty ere the winter is on us; for the upper margins of the ditches and the tops of the knolls are crested with thick bunches of heather, which, though scarcely noticeable now, will one day shake out fragrant bells in the autumn wind, and flush the moorland with a purple glory. Far away to the left we hear the jangling call of a bird—‘liddle-liddle-liddle’—rapid, bell-like, long-continued. It is a familiar sound during the summer months to the wanderer among the hills, arousing, as it does, all the other birds far and near as if with an alarum-bell. The call is that of the sandpiper—in some places known, from its cry, as the ‘little fiddler,’ in others as the ‘killieleepie.’ It is one of our migratory birds, reaching us from the south in the month of April, and starting on its travels again, with its young family, in the autumn. Among the other bird-calls which its wild, startling cry has awakened, is a plaintive ‘tee-oo, tee-oo,’ sounding eerily over the heath. It is the voice of the graceful redshank, which has left the seashore, as it does every spring, and come up with its mate to the moors to spend their honeymoon and rear their young brood; and by-and-by it will lead back to the sandy shore a little following of red-legs, who will learn to pick crustaceans from the shallow pools, and prepare for a journey to the hills on their own account next spring. On before us, in a clump of firs on a distant height, we hear the deep note of the cuckoo, booming out with its regular cadences, calling to mind the oldest lyric in the English tongue:
Summer is i-cumin in,
Loud sing, cuckoo!
Groweth seed,
And bloweth mead,
And springeth the wood noo.