there was a piper to march up and down before the window and play while
we ate dinner--a very complimentary and disquieting performance. But
there are many occasions in life when pride can be entertained only at
the expense of comfort.

Of course Sandy was my gillie. It was a fine sight to see him exhibiting
the tiny American trout-rod, tied with silk ribbons in its delicate
case, to the other gillies and exulting over them. Every morning he
would lead me away through the heather to some lonely loch on the
shoulders of the hills, from which we could look down upon the Northern
Sea and the blue Orkney Isles far away across the Pentland Firth.
Sometimes we would find a loch with a boat on it, and drift up and
down, casting along the shores. Sometimes, in spite of Sandy's confident
predictions, no boat could be found, and then I must put on the
Mackintosh trousers and wade out over my hips into the water, and
circumambulate the pond, throwing the flies as far as possible toward
the middle, and feeling my way carefully along the bottom with the long
net-handle, while Sandy danced on the bank in an agony of apprehension
lest his Predestinated Opportunity should step into a deep hole and be
drowned. It was a curious fact in natural history that on the lochs with
boats the trout were in the shallow water, but in the boatless lochs
they were away out in the depths. "Juist the total depraivity o'
troots," said Sandy, "an' terrible fateegin'."

Sandy had an aversion to commit himself to definite statements on any
subject not theological. If you asked him how long the morning's tramp
would be, it was "no verra long, juist a bit ayant the hull yonner." And
if, at the end of the seventh mile, you complained that it was much too
far, he would never do more than admit that "it micht be shorter."
If you called him to rejoice over a trout that weighed close upon two