Storms--An "inch" of Rain--Atherina Presbyter--Lophius
Piscatorius--Mr. Mortimer Collins' misquotation from the Times.
A finer winter [January 1871] never was known all over the West
Highlands and Hebrides. Some tempestuousness is to be looked for
at this season, and some tempestuousness we have had, but of actual
winter rigour and cold we have hardly had a trace. Only twice during
the winter have we had any frost, and even then it was but slight
and of short duration. On several occasions, however, we have had
such terrible rainfalls as are only known perhaps within sight of the
mountain peaks of Jura and Mull and Morven. On the 19th of January,
and again on the 23d, the rainfall within a given time was heavier
than anything known even with us for many years past. In about sixteen
hours on the 19th, 4·19 inches fell, and quite as much, if not more,
on the 23d. Now, does the reader know what an inch of rain means? It
means a gallon of water spread evenly over a surface of something like
two square feet, or, to put it in a more striking and intelligible
form, it means a fall of a hundred tons upon an acre of land; so that
in sixteen hours on the 19th upwards of four hundred tons of rain
fell on every acre of land for miles and miles around us. It will
be confessed that thus the country was for once at least well soaked
and saturated. All our rivers and mountain torrents were, of course,
in full flood, and throughout the night, when it had calmed down a
little, the "noise of many waters," as you lay awake on your pillow
and listened, made wild and eerie music enough, to which the fitting
bass was the boom of the storm-driven rollers as they broke in sullen
thunder along the shore. We had occasion to be across Corran Ferry on
the wettest of these days, bad as it was, and, in spite of waterproofs
and haps of most approved texture and form, we returned in the evening
so soaked and drenched and droukit, to use an expressive Scotticism,
that we might as well have been for half an hour up to our chin,
over head and ears for that matter of it, in the deepest pool of
the Rhi. When changing our clothes in our own room after getting
home, we managed to raise a quiet laugh with ourselves over it all,
by the recollection of the music and words of a favourite Scotch
reel not altogether inapplicable to our then condition. The reel in
question is a well-known one, though we forget at present its proper
distinctive name. It is, we think, one of Neil Gow's. A gudewife,
presumably of Amazonian heart, and also of Amazonian proportions,
makes her husband wince and quail, and conduct himself with becoming
amiability and decorum, as she sings--
"Mur 'bi'dh agam ach trudair bodaich,
Bhogain anns an allt e;
Mur 'bi'dh agam ach trudair bodaich,
Bhogain anns an allt e;
Bhogain agus bhogain agus bhogain th'ar a cheann e,
'S mur 'bi'dh a glan 'nuair bhidh e tioram,
Bhogain 'rithisd ann e!"
Not very easily turned into English, but this is something like it--
"If my gudeman were cross and dour,
I'd dip him in the burn, O!
If my gudeman were cross and sour,
I'd dip him in the burn, O;
I'd dip the dear o'er head and ears until he'd grane and girn, O,
And till he promised better things, he'd get the tother turn, O."
While stripping, it struck us that we were quite as wet on the occasion
in question, as if for our sins we had undergone all the "dipping"
threatened by the gudewife in the old reel; and the idea put us into
good humour until tea and other fireside comforts made us forget
all the pelting of the pitiless storm. How the remainder of winter
and early spring may turn out meteorologically, it is impossible to
forecast with any confidence, but meantime our old people, in their
own opinion, at least, weatherwise and shrewd quoad hoc, are gravely
shaking their heads over what they deem an unusual dearth of frost
and snow in mid-winter.
Our West Coast storms, if in one sense sometimes disagreeable enough,
rarely fail, however, to bring us a good thing in the shape of hundreds
of tons of drift-ware, which, gathered and spread on the land, is
found to be a valuable fertiliser. It is a labour, besides, which
falls to be done in a season when there is little else to occupy the
people's time, and saves an immense deal of trouble when the spring
comes round, for the land is ready for the plough and the immediate
reception of the seed, whatever the crop--thus saving at once the
manure heap for purposes in which farmyard manure is indispensable,
and all the trouble of long cartage afield. In collecting his
share of a huge swathe of this drift-ware the other day, one of our
neighbours found a dead fish, quite fresh and unmutilated, which
being new to him, though a fisherman and sea-shore man all his life,
he thought might be interesting to us. He accordingly brought it to
us, and to us also it was new, and as such, of course, exceedingly
interesting. We puzzled long over it ere we satisfied ourselves that
we had determined its identity. It was a small fish, some six inches
in length, and of smelt-like shape and form and colouring, but it
was not a smelt. After some little trouble, we finally decided that
it was a species of atherine (Atherina) belonging to the Mugilidæ or
mullet family. Our particular specimen was the Atherina presbyter,
a not uncommon visitor on some of the south of England shores, but so
rare in our seas that, as we have already said, we never saw a specimen
before. We are told that the atherine is very good eating, and we can
quite believe it, for it is a pretty, delicate-looking little fish,
that, nicely fried until properly crimp and brown, ought to taste
well. A much commoner fish, but interesting in this instance for the
great size of the specimen, was an angler, fishing-frog, or sea-devil
(Lophius piscatorius), which was cast ashore near Corran Ferry last
week. This was the largest individual of the species--the ugliest,
perhaps, of all fishes--that we ever saw. It measured five feet seven
inches from snout to tip of tail, and weighed fifty-three pounds. It
was poor and fleshless, and had died seemingly of sheer inanition or
atrophy; had it been in full condition, it would have weighed a third
more. Its terrible mouth, with its formidable array of sharp recurved
teeth, was enough to scare a friend that accompanied us to a distance,
though we assured him that the brute was dead and harmless. On opening
out its jaws to a fair extent--that is, as far as we thought the animal
itself would open them easily if need were, we placed a large turnip
from a pit that was conveniently at hand, a turnip nearly as large as
a man's head, easily within the horrid cavern. We would willingly have
taken this specimen home with us, for the purpose of preserving the
skeleton, but we had no conveyance with us, and any idea of carrying
it was out of the question. It had, besides, evidently lain some
time on the beach, and its odour on moving it in the least was, the
reader may believe, the very antipodes of Eau de Cologne or ottar of
roses. We contented ourselves therefore with slitting open its stomach
with our pocket-knife, and found it, as we expected, perfectly empty,
containing nothing in the shape of food, except the tips of two claws
and small bits of the carapace of a not uncommon species of crab,
the velvet fiddler (Portunas puber). The Highlanders of the west coast
and Hebrides call the angler Mac Làmhaich, properly Mac Làthaich--the
son (that is, inhabitant) of the mud or ooze; a very expressive and
appropriate name for it, for it is essentially a mud fish, in which,
half buried and perdu, it hides and watches, tiger-like, for its
prey. The naturalist meets with many things to puzzle him, and it has
always puzzled us to account for the large size of this animal's head
and mouth, altogether disproportioned to the size of the rest of the
body. No matter how insatiable the cravings of the brute's maw--to
use a Miltonic word--no matter how gluttonous soever of appetite, the
head and mouth, and number and size of teeth, do seem unnecessarily
formidable, monstrous indeed, for any conceivable work that they
can be called upon to perform; and yet there is unquestionably good
reason for it all, if we could only find it out. It may interest some
of our readers to know that the sea-devil belongs, ichthyologically,
to the Acanthopterygious family of fishes. Acanthopterygious! what a
staggerer to any one except a learned ichthyologist at a Spelling Bee.
Mr. Mortimer Collins and others are recently down, somewhat
hypercritically we can't help thinking, on Mr. Tennyson's occasional
natural history references throughout his poems. The fun is
that in almost every instance in which fault is found with him,
Mr. Tennyson is right and his critics wrong! Here is one example of
this hypercriticism in which Mr. Mortimer Collins is fairly hoist
with his own petard. Mr. Tennyson writes--
"In spring a fuller crimson comes upon the robin's breast."
Upon which Mr. Collins comments--"As a fact, that fuller crimson comes
in autumn, as all know who watch the half-shy, half-familiar bird--
"That ever in the haunch of winter sings."
Here Mr. Mortimer Collins is partly right and largely wrong,
while Mr. Tennyson is altogether right. It is true that our native
song-birds, moulting in autumn or early winter, assume at this season a
thicker, warmer, fresher plumage after all the wear and tear consequent
on the labours of nidification, incubation, and love-making throughout
the spring and summer; but it is equally true that it is only in
spring, as Mr. Tennyson correctly asserts, that our wild birds assume
their gaudiest and gayest attire, every colour and shade of colour
in the individual bird's feathering there and then only being at its
best and brightest. And when we remember that spring is the season of
love and incipient song, we should be very much surprised, and with
good reason, if the fact were otherwise. So far as our recollection
serves us, Mr. Mortimer Collins, or any one else, will find it rather
difficult to catch Mr. Tennyson tripping in the direction indicated. We
should say that the Poet Laureate was rather remarkable than otherwise
for his fidelity to nature and truth in all his local colouring.
Some time ago, by the way, we had occasion to call attention to the
exceeding frequency of misquotation in our current literature, and
in quarters, too, where one would least expect it. Here is a curious
and very unpardonable instance, all things considered. In a review
of the South Kensington Handbooks, in the Times of the 18th January,
a sentence opens thus--"It is well-known that weary lies the head that
wears a crown." Every one will see that the manifest intention here is
to quote from the monologue of the poor harassed and sleepless King
in Shakespeare's Henry IV. (part second), one of the finest things
that even Shakespeare ever wrote, and we had thought too well-known
by every one with any pretensions to literature to be misquoted. The
concluding lines are these:--
"Can'st thou, O partial sleep, give thy repose
To the wet sea-boy in an hour so rude;
And in the calmest and most stillest night,
With all appliances and means to boot,
Deny it to a king? Then, happy, low, lie down:
Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown."