The fisheries for the common herring, the pilchard, and the sprat, are carried on, with a brief interval, all the year round; but the great herring season is during the autumn—from August to October—when the sea is covered with boats in pursuit of that fine fish, and in some of its phases the herring-fishery assumes an aspect that is decidedly picturesque. Every little bay all round the island has its tiny fleet; the mountain closed lochs of the Western Highlands have each a fishery; while at some of the more important fishing-stations there are very large fleets assembled—as at Wick, Dunbar, Ardrishaig, Stornoway, Peterhead, and Anstruther. The chief curers have places of business in these towns, where they keep a large store of curing materials and a competent staff of coopers and others to aid them in their business. Such boats as do not carry on a local fishery proceed from the smaller fishing-villages to one or other of the centres of the herring trade. In fact, wherever an enterprising curer sets up his stand, there the boats will gather round him; and beside him will collect a mob of all kinds of miscellaneous people—dealers in salt, sellers of barrel-staves, vendors of “cutch,” Prussian herring-buyers, comely girls from the inland districts to gut, and men from the Highlands anxious to officiate as “hired hands.” Itinerant ministers and revivalists also come on the scene and preach occasional sermons to the hundreds of devout Scotch people who are assembled; and thus arises many a prosperous little town, or at least towns that might be prosperous were the finny treasures of the sea always plentiful. As the chief herring season comes on a kind of madness seizes on all engaged, ever so remotely, in the trade; as for those more immediately concerned, they seem to go completely “daft,” especially the younger hands. The old men, too, come outside to view the annual preparations, and talk, with revived enthusiasm, to their sons and grandsons about what they did twenty years agone; the young men spread out the shoulder-of-mutton sails of their boats to view and repair defects; and the wives and sweethearts, by patching and darning, contrive to make old nets “look amaist as weel as new;” boilers bubble with the brown _catechu_, locally called “cutch,” which is used as a preservative for the nets and sails; while all along the coasts old boats are being cobbled up and new ones are being built and launched.