The shoal of whales at present disporting themselves in Lochiel, intending probably, tourist fashion, to visit Inverness by-and-by, via the Caledonian Canal, if they can only arrange it with the authorities, did us the honour to visit Loch Leven, spending an entire day with us, evidently very much to their own satisfaction, if one might judge from their lively somersaultings and incessant gambollings. These whales--a shoal of some five or six hundred, we should say--were a very interesting sight as they gambolled about within a hundred yards of us, blowing loudly the while and lashing the sea with foam, until you might have heard the hurly-burly from the top of the highest mountain in the neighbourhood. They were of all sizes, from full growth, and old age perhaps, down to veriest babyhood. In the shoal, two kinds of whale were mingled together in apparent amity and good-fellowship: the common bottlenose (Baloenoptera acuto-rostrata of La Cèpede--the highest authority on cetaceous animals), measuring some twenty or twenty-five feet in length, and the broad-nosed or rorqual whale (Baloena musculus, Linn.; B. rorqual, La Cèpede), from fifty to sixty feet in length, and appearing beside a bottlenose, as they came to the surface to breathe, like a Clydesdale horse beside a Shetland pony. It will be strange if our friends at Fort-William do not manage to bag some of them ere they repass the narrows at Corran Ferry. The heat is oppressive within doors; but Loch Leven, we observe, is darkening under a rippling breeze from the south-east, and we are off for a sail in our tidy, little craft, that, with lugsail sheeted home, will go to windward of anything of equal size on the coast. CHAPTER XIV. Herrings--Chimæra Monstrosa--Cure for Ringworm--Cold Tea Leaves for inflamed and blood-shot Eyes--An old Incantation for the cure of Sore Eyes--A curious Dirk Sheath--A Tannery of Human Skins.