McDiarmid the author; thence to Moffat, and up that dismal glen, the
pass of Moffat, to the grey mare's tail, a waterfall, so called from
its resembling the silvery tail of a grey mare; and truly, if the
simile were extended into infinitude, which from its sublimity it
would admit of, we might compare its waving, silky stream swinging
over the broad face of its lofty grey rock, to the tail of the pale
horse of Revelation, over the chaos of time. It was a sombre, solemn
sort of a day, and the dense clouds hung curtaining down the mountain
sides, like our living pall as it were--I scarcely know how--but we
felt dismally until we took a dram and got into a perspiration, with
tugging up the sinuosities of the cliff's, to the summit of the
waterfall. Loch Skein, where we were galvanized, electrified,
magnetized, and petrified, all at once, by the quackery, clackery,
flappery, quatter, splatter, clatter, scatter, and dash-de-blash, and
squash, of a flock of wild ducks, on its reedy, flaggy surface; O,
what a _scutter_ was there! Our hearts, too full, leapt into our
mouths, but our guns were turned into tons of lead, and ere we could
heave them up to our shoulders of clay, the thousand had fled into the
eternal grey mist of the mountain, like the dispersion of a confused
dream. There we stood like two sumphs, (as Hogg calls those who are
ganging a bit aglee in their wits) gaping and staring at each other
with a look which said, why did not _you_ shoot? Our dogs too stood
as stiff as two pumps, with tails standing out like the handles!
_Apropos_--talking of Hogg, the poet, we called to see him in his
half-acre island in Eltrive Lake, and truly we met with that burning
hot reception which we had anticipated from _Blackwood's Magazine_
description of him. We had no _notes of introduction_ except the notes
which our guns pricked upon the echoes of Ettric Forest, and which
James Hogg heard and answered with a view-hallo, for us to "come awa
doon the brae an' tak' a dram o'speerits," and so we did, and in true