Tourist Grumblers; how to deal with them—Sea
Fishing—Superstition about a Gull— Josephus—Story of Mosollam and the
Augur.
W ith a
bright sun overhead, at noon as nearly vertical as it can ever be in our
latitudes, and a steady, kindly warmth, and no lack now of genial
showers, our West Highlands are now [June 1876] beautiful exceedingly,
almost at the height and heyday of their summer loveliness, while crops
of all kinds are at their present stage all that we could wish them.
Tourists in considerable numbers are already on the move; and coaches
and steamers alike are beginning to carry daily increasing crowds of
passengers, so delighted with the attention paid them, and the elegance
and comfort of their surroundings whether afloat or ashore, that a crack
with them, as you chance to forgather of an evening, is always pleasant,
for the essentials of a pleasant conversation are there to begin with;
they are pleased, and you are glad that it is so; the rest is all smooth
sailing. You meet an occasional grumbler of course; a wretch, miserable
himself, and anxious to make every one else miserable also. An
extraordinary curiosity, in truth, is your thorough grumbler. The
faculty would probably explain it all away by a reference to dyspepsia
or some serious derangement of liver. From frequent and close study,
however, of a not uninteresting phenomenon, we are rather inclined to
think otherwise. In the genuine grumbler the disposition to look at
things obliquely, and from a false or foreshortened point of view, seems
ingrained in and interwoven with his very nature. In everything he says
and does you detect a perverseness of disposition and a thrawnness of
temper that you cannot believe to be temporary or accidental, but a
veritable part and portion of the man's being from the first. The old
dictum about the poet, which after all is only true in a sense, is true
of the grumbler absolutely. Grumblerus
nascitur, non fit; he
was born a grumbler, and if you put his mother in the witness box, and
she chose to entertain you with reminiscences of his infancy, her
testimony, we venture to say, would go to show that he kicked and
screamed at existence and all the surroundings of his nursery at the
earliest moment possible for such an exhibition, and that this
disposition to hit out right and left indiscriminately at every one and
everything, grew with his growth and strengthened with his strength,
till in fulness of time he became the thoroughbred grumbler who sat
opposite you at the table
d'hote a
week ago, or rode with you atop of the coach yesterday. With spur on
heel, and once fairly in the stirrups, your grumbler is ready to tilt,
in dearth of anything more substantial, at his own shadow. Any attempt
to mollify him, however well-meant and carefully worded, only makes him
worse. Do what you can, he remains a grumbler still—implacable,
unappeasable. As we generally meet with him here, his grievances for the
most part are as to the steamer or coach by which he has travelled, and
the food that he has had to eat. Try to put him right according to your
view of it, and you are sure to catch it hot and heavy for your
interference in a matter which he declares concerns him alone,
and yet with which he has been pestering everybody that would for a
moment listen to him all the way from Oban to Staffa, or from
Ballachulish to Tyndrum. Give a man of this kind the softest cushion in
the coziest corner of Cleopatra's barge; the box seat in the victor's
own chariot in a triumphal procession; a first and full supply of all
the delicacies at the table of Apicius of De
re Culinaria fame,
and he would still be the same fault-finder and grumbler. One way of
shutting up the inveterate grumbler, very effectual in most cases, is to
fool bim to , the top of his bent—to give him line, in the piscatorial
sense. If he complains that his seat on the coach is hard and the rails
behind hurt his spine, assure him at once, in a confidential sort of
way, that you believe the axle is horribly twisted, and is as likely as
not to snap in twain just about half-way down the next incline. If he
complains of the dust, give it as your candid opinion that the Road
Trustees should be heavily fined for not allaying the nuisance by a
properly arranged water-cart service all over the Black Mount. If he
complains that the steamer trembles in all her timbers, and the steam,
as it escapes at the calling-places, makes a horrible noise, agree with
him at once, hinting that an explosion of the boiler is by no means an
unlikely event through the carelessness of the coal-begrimed stoker, who
is just then cooling himself at an open airhole, and wiping his brow
with a wisp of tow. If at dinner he abuses the soup, ask him how it
could possibly be good, seeing that the water whereof it is made was
taken a week ago, by means of a tarry bucket, from the third lock of the
Crinan Canal. Does he abuse his salmon? Shake your head sadly, and point
with your fork towards the round of beef, hinting that at this season
cattle sometimes die a natural death, and then their carcasses are to be
had for a third of the market price of good beef. Go with him and beyond
him in this sort of way for a little, and he will soon see that you are
only poking your fun at him, and the chances are that he will cease
troubling you at
all events with his complaints for the rest of the day. After all,
however, it is but justice to observe that even your inveterate grumbler
is not infrequently a much more amiable person than he seems; kind, too,
after a fashion, and amazingly liberal when a proper occasion offers.
Fish are now becoming plentiful along our shores, and
with a little trouble in selecting a very early or a very late hour, and
watching the state of the tides, they may be caught in considerable
numbers with rod and line; and irrespective of their value as an article
of food, the pastime is by no means contemptible even as a matter of
sport, though, sooth to say, many people live within sight of the sea
for years, and know little or nothing of the amusement that may be had
so readily and cheaply in this way. Those caught at present are
principally whitings, lythes, and seths, or coal-fish, with an
occasional sea-bream. This last is reckoned a somewhat coarse fish, but
it is by no means bad eating when properly cooked and served, and you
recollect as you eat that the price of mutton is something like a
shilling the pound, and frequently not to be had even at that.
More prone, perhaps, to superstition in every form than
their more inland brethren, our maritime population have quite a number
of freits, forms,
fancies, and superstitious observances, most of them only silly and
harmless enough, in connection with all their sea-fishing adventures,
whether with rod, net, or line. A few evenings ago, as a party of four,
douce and decent men enough, were preparing to launch their boat to go
a-fishing, we chanced to pass along the beach, joining them, as has long
been our habit in such circumstances, for a few minutes' conversation.
Suddenly, as we were speaking, a large black-backed gull (Larus
marinus) wheeled
towards us out of a flock that were lazily circling about at a
considerable distance seawards. Eight towards us, as if on some express
and special errand, came the gull, one of the largest and most beautiful
of sea-birds, until he was within less than fifty yards of us, when by a
change of poise, and a scarcely perceptible movement of wing, he slowly
swept round our heads, screaming the while as only a black-backed gull
can scream—a wild and eerie note that may be heard for a league. The
gull's business, whatever it might be, was so manifestly connected with
one or all of us, or with the boat, perhaps, round which we
were standing
on the beach, that it could not but attract attention and provoke
comment from the most unobservant. After circling some half-dozen times
round and round and right above our heads, the bird, with one loud
parting scream—and yet scream is not the word either; the Gaelic guileag is
nearer it—and with an upward oblique sweep, so beautifully easy and
effortless that it seemed the result of a simple act of volition rather
than a grand pas in
volitation, flew away to join his companions, who were now heard
clamouring over a coal-fish goil or
boil, as the Highlanders call the ebullition of the surface play of a
shoal of sea-fish. The men looked at each other and at us meaningly; and
at last out it came. "Small chance," said one of them, "have we of
anything like a good fishing this evening: better for us to stay at
home." "Why so?" we quietly inquired. "Well, sir," was the response, "I
never knew a gull act in that sort of way but it meant bad luck in
fishing, and the non-accomplishment of one's errand afloat, whatever it
might be." The rest agreed with the speaker, but we persuaded them,
after some trouble, to proceed to their fishing-ground, to give it a
trial at least; and when, at a much later hour, they returned, we were
on the beach to meet them, and found that after all they had made an
excellent fishing. There and then we sat down beside them as they were
dividing their fish into equal shares, and told them the following story
from Joseph us, Against
Apion. Quoting
from Hecatseus, the great Jewish historian proceeds:—"As I was myself
going to the Red Sea, there followed us a man, whose name was Mosollam;
he was one of the Jewish horsemen who conducted us. He was a person of
great courage, of a strong body, and by all allowed to be the most
skilful archer that was either among the Greeks or barbarians. Now, this
man, as people were in great numbers passing along the road, and a
certain augur -tfas observing an augury by a bird, and requiring them
all to stand still, inquired what they staid for. Hereupon the augur
showed him the bird from whence he told his augury, and told him that if
the bird staid where he was, they ought all to stand still; hut that if
he got up and flew onward, they must go forward; hut that if he flew
backward, they must retire again. Mosollam made no reply, but drew his
bow and shot at the bird, and hit him and killed him; and as the augur
and some others were very angry, and wished imprecations upon him, he
answered them thus:— 'Why
are you so mad as to take this most unhappy bird into your hands for how
can this bird give us any true information concerning our march, which
could not foresee how to save himself? For had he been able to foreknow
what was future, he would not have come to this place, but would have
been afraid lest Mosollam the Jew would shoot him as he has done, and
kill him.'" The men, who had listened most attentively, smiled as we
concluded, and agreed that Mosollam must have been a very sensible man;
and vowed that for the future they would attach no more meaning or
importance to a circling, screaming gull, than to the chirping of a wren
in the elder bushes at the cottage doors. And what after all, the reader
may ask, brought the black-backed gull circling and screaming over your
heads 1 Well, from its great and immense spread of wing, it was probably
the leader and guardian of its own particular flock, and as such thought
it his duty to reconnoitre in person, in case the five men about the
boat on the beach should have sinister intentions as to him or his. His
scream or guileag was
just his way of telegraphing the results of his observations to his
distant companions; or he may have been scolding us in his own manner
for our manifest intention of leaving the land, and invading what he
considered his own proper element and territory, the sea. A more prosaic
explanation, if it please you better, is perhaps to be found in the fact
that the boat was internally largely incrusted with fish scales, and
smelt strongly of fish, and that that, to one of his sensitive olfactory
nerves, was the only or main attraction, the rest being mere idle
curiosity, from which
birds are no more exempt than men. One thing only is
certain, if difficult to be accounted for, and that is, that individual
gulls frequently act as this gull acted when a boat is about to put off
from the shore in the fishing season, which being occasionally
connected, as must sometimes happen, however accidentally, with an
unsuccessful fishing adventure, gave rise to the silly superstition
which, by the aid of Flavius Josephus, we were able in this instance at
least successfully to combat. |