should note that I have not made the boatman say “whateffer,” because he doesn’t.  The occasional use of the imperfect is almost his only Gaelic idiom.  It is a great comfort and pleasure, when the trout do not rise, to meet a skilled and unaffected narrator of the old beliefs, old legends, as ancient as the hills that girdle and guard the loch, or as antique, at least, as man’s dwelling among the mountains—the Yellow Hill, the Calf Hill, the Hill of the Stack.  The beauty of the scene, the pleasant talk, the daffodils on the green isle among the Celtic graves, compensate for a certain “dourness” among the fishes of Loch Awe.  On the occasions when they are not dour they rise very pleasant and free, but, in these brief moments, it is not of legends and folklore that you are thinking, but of the landing-net.  The boatman, by the way, was either not well acquainted with Märchen—Celtic nursery-tales such as Campbell of Islay collected, or was not much interested in them, or, perhaps, had the shyness about narrating this particular sort of old wives’ fables which is so common.  People who do know them seldom tell them in Sassenach.