The pleasantest road to the loch will be the path along the mountain-side, and old John M’Gregor can be requisitioned as boatman, by the way. Yonder he is, under the flowering gean-tree, mending his garden wicket. An easy, comfortable life the old man lives, with his many-wrinkled, bright-eyed old wife, on their “wee bit bield and heathery moor.” In that snug, thatched little cot they have reared a stalwart brood--sons whose strong hands are tilling their own broad acres in the West, and daughters in southern lands, about whose knees are springing, sturdy as seedling oaks, the true materials for future nations. But old John and his wife will be beholden to none of them yet, and when his little croft has been planted for the summer and his peats cast on the moor, when the cow has been turned out to the hill in the morning and the calf tethered in the narrow paddock, he is always ready to take an oar on the loch. His broad-eaved Balmoral bonnet and his rough homespun coat are green with long years of sun and rain; but the head and heart below them keep hale as ever. He is full of anecdotes about the last laird and his feats with the salmon-rod, and it takes a long day of wind on the water to tire his arm when the trout are rising. Quick, though! There is a cloud just now before the sun, and a fish or two may be got while the shadow is on the loch. It was a mistake to coil up the fly-casts in the tackle-book, for the gut will take some wetting to straighten it out again. It is better to keep the flies round your hat. There, push the boat off; the water is fairly alive with leaping minnows in the shallow bays, and if the bigger fish be only as eager there will be plenty of sport. Try a cast or two first across the burn mouth; a good chance of something lies there, for the trout wait in the running water to seize any food the stream may bring down. The boat can drift broadside to the wind, so that it is possible to fish both from bow and stern. Bring your line well up behind, and then with a turn of the wrist use the switch of the rod to send the cast out, fair and straight and light, before you. Take care, though; do not begin to work the line before the last fly has touched the surface. The day could not be better, with that ripple on the water, the wind behind, and the sun in front. Hardly an effort is needed to send the line out, and it is possible to put the tail-fly on the very spot where a trout has risen. See! here is a little fellow. What a splashing he makes as the line draws him up to the boat! The spring of the rod itself will lift him over the gunwale. There! you have another; a char, by his sides of gleaming silver and copper.