—Cows
fond of Mushrooms— Shoals of Whales—A rippling Breeze, and a Sail on
Loch Leven.
If of
late we had to admit—somewhat reluctantly he it confessed—that it was
"wet, very wet,"
even for Lochaber, we have it in our power now at length [1st August
1870] to strike a different key-note, and to say that it is dry, very dry;
bright, very bright;
hot, very hot,—so
dry, bright, and hot, in fact, that one might as well be on the banks of
the Nile or Niger as on the shores of Loch Leven, were it not for a
delightful sea breeze that never fails to come to cheer and gladden us
evening and morning; and then you
may fancy—that is, if you can swim, dear reader— the unspeakable delight
of a headlong plunge into the cool and sparkling waters of the advancing
tide! The heat is in truth something extraordinary, and if it weren't
that you felt yourself fast retrograding into the same condition, it
would be an amusing study to watch a certain class of people, generally
the most staid and stiff and correct possible, who, as a rule, would
rather die than violate the least of the proprieties, now going about in
a semi-nude state, as if they had just escaped from a lunatic asylum,
panting the while as if they were in the last stage of asthma, and
streaming with perspiration as if they had resolutely made up their
minds to melt away and dissolve like untimely snowballs.
Crops everywhere are splendid, and, after all the rain of
the earlier part of the season, which gave them growth, this
is just the weather that suits them in their present stage,
strengthening and consolidating their tissues, and bringing them to a
rapid and healthy maturity. The meadow hay crop is unusually heavy
everywhere. We saw a field belonging to Mr. Maclean of Argdour in the
act of being cut the other day, and we never saw anything finer or
heavier fall before a scythe. This is precisely the weather for securing
such a heavy swathe in good order, although one cannot but feel for the
poor scythesman, who, brown as an Indian and bathed in sweat, wields his
glittering weapon under a burning, blazing sun, such as at a pinch might
serve the turn of our cousins of Jamaica or Demerara. Some idea of the
extraordinary heat and drought of the past week may be gathered from the
fact that it was frequently found possible to stack or carry into the
barn in one day the hay that had only been cut on the day
previous—something hitherto unheard-of, we should say, in Lochaber, or,
indeed, in any part of the Highlands.
We cannot recollect having ever before seen all kinds of
fungi so plentiful as they are throughout Lochaber this season. You meet
mushrooms of all sizes and of all shapes, both edible and poisonous;
while fairy rings are so common that you may encounter one or more of
them in every bit of old pasture and in every greenwood glade. One of
these rings we had the curiosity to measure a few days ago, and we
found" its diameter to be precisely fifteen feet, giving it a
circumference of upwards of fifty feet, as nearly as possible a a
perfect circle, the emerald outline, studded with its peculiar pretty
white, button-like Agaraci, amid
the lighter green of the surrounding herbage, aS distinct and easily
traceable, even at several hundred yards distance, as ever was halo
round the moon. We noticed that a cow, happening to come the way while
we were examining another of these fairy rings, ate them all with
evident relish, browsing so steadily along and around, that when she
completed the circle she hail not left a single one. We hope that they
agreed with her, though we should not like to have joined in the repast,
for we have a salutary horror of the whole mushroom tribe. The so-called
edible mushroom is said to bo delicious when properly cooked : should it
ever in any form be a disli on a table at which we are seated, we
promise to give our share of it, totus,
teres atque rotundus, whole
and unimpaired, to the first that will accept it. To the present intense
heat, coming so suddenly on the back of long-continued rains, is
probably due the extraordinary abundance of all kinds of fungi.
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 (Balcenoptera
acuto-rostrata of
La Cepede—the highest authority on cetaceous animals), measuring some
twenty or twenty-five feet in length, and the broad-nosed or rorqual
whale (Balcena
musculus, Linn.; B.
rorqual, La
C&pede), 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.
