A gentleman in the opposite district of Appin sent us a message a few days ago begging us to go and have a look at what he termed a rarissimus piscis, a most rare fish that had been caught in a scringe net along with a lot of sethe and mackerel. In complying with such messages we can seldom be charged with dilatoriness, as most of our friends will bear witness. Nor was it otherwise in this case; Cha be'n ruith ach an leùm, as the Highlanders say--it was not a run but a rush, with a leap and a bound--when they would emphatically characterise a person's conduct in going about anything with extraordinary alacrity. The fish in question we found to be an old acquaintance of ours, though so rare on the west coast that we never saw or heard of it before during a twenty years' residence in the country, and constantly, too, on the out-look for everything in the shape and semblance of a rara avis, whether encased in fur, feather, or scales. It was the gar-fish of British zoologists, known in ichthyological nomenclature as the Belone vulgaris of the family Scomberesocidæ, having the body, which is covered with minute scales, elongated to a degree almost conger-like. It is frequently captured on the east coast, sometimes intermingling with mackerel and haddock shoals in considerable numbers. We have seen it in the Perth, Dundee, and Edinburgh fish markets; never, as we have said, on the west coast. It is said to be excellent eating when in proper season, although there is a prejudice against its use amongst the fishermen themselves; and it is a remarkable fact, by the way, that some of the finest fish in the sea--most in esteem, at all events, with the fish-eating public--are frequently rejected by their professional captors for their own eating in favour of what we should call the coarser and inferior kinds. For a long time we thought this was entirely a matter of economy, those that brought the largest price in the market being sold, and the inferior sorts kept for their own consumption. Subsequently we had abundant opportunities of finding out that it was far otherwise. An east coast fisherman will give the preference at any time, for his own eating that is, to a flounder, however flabby and flaccid, over a whiting or plaice; he will eat the hake rather than the finest cod or haddock, and considers the wing of a skate, dried in the smoke until it is of the colour of the darkest mahogany, with a bouquet the very opposite, be sure, of the ottar of roses, a tit-bit with which, in his estimation, neither sea-trout, mackerel, nor turbot can for a moment bear comparison. Fishermen, too, we have observed with some surprise, seldom eat their fish fresh; they prefer it salted--salted, moreover, as a rule to a degree that to other people would render it almost uneatable. For the prejudice against the gar-fish there is, however, some excuse. In popular superstition, "lang-nebbed" things have always been in bad odour;