ALLAN MTAVISH'S FISHING. Why cross the gloomy firth to-day? * * * The blackening wave is edged with white, The fishers have heard the Water-sprite, Lay of the Last Minstrel. In a secluded nook of one of the wildest and most solitary parts of the Argyllshire coast, where it is washed by the Atlantic waters, there stood some thirty years ago the cottage of a Highland fisherman. The traveller who should now look for its site, would probably be unrewarded for his pains; it has long since mouldered from the face of the earth. A few stones, half buried among sand, are all that remain to indicate where the humble dwelling of human hearts once sanctified the bosom of solitude; yet were its walls the mute witnesses of love as deep-of agony as intense -as ever lived and burned within the soul beneath the roofs of palaces. Nature is no respecter of places. The passions, which obey her call, belong alike to all her children; the decay which follows her footsteps, is the appointed lot of all things wherein these children have a part here below. At the period of which I speak, the cottage stood at the very base of a range of lofty and precipitous cliffs, which, retiring in a semicircle from the shore at that particular spot, left a recess at their feet, whose only opening was to the sea. This little nook, not more than half an acre in extent was during high water entirely separated from communication with the world beyond it, as the sea flowed up to the base of the rocky walls which, girding it on either side, extended themselves along the coast. The only mode by which it was at such times. possible to obtain egress from it, was one accessible to no foot, save that of a daring and fearless craigsman, that of scrambling on hands and knees across the face of the rocks, which, beetling over a sea so high and tempestuous, looked as though they defied the pigmy efforts of man to surmount their mighty rampart. Yet this feat, frightful as it would have appeared to one unaccustomed to it, had more than once been accomplished by the bold and sure-footed inhabitants of the coast, by means of strong wooden poles, ropes to aid their descent, and a judicious method of availing themselves of every projecting bush, or tuft of heather, to assist their toilsome progress. At ebb tide, a narrow strip of sand, turning the projecting headlands, afforded a path whereby to gain |