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Allan of Forres, that he has frequently found a Diodon, floating alive and distended, in the stomach of the shark, and that on several occasions he has known it eat its way, not only through the coats of the stomach, but through the sides of the monster, which has thus been killed. Who would ever have imagined that a little soft fish could have destroyed the great and savage shark? March 18th.
The other story issues from a place called Imagination; it is gloomy and wonderful, and you shall hear it. A year or two before Edward the Confessor began to rule England, a battle was won in Scotland against a Norwegian King by two generals named Macbeth and Banquo. After the battle, the generals walked together towards Forres, in Elginshire, where Duncan, King of Scotland, was awaiting them.
After a while the flood more or less spent itself, and Vane seized the occasion of a pause for breath to ask after old John. "I see you've got a new lodge-keeper, Sir John. Robert tells me that the old man who was here under Lord Forres is in the village." "Yes. Had to get rid of him. Too slow. I like efficiency, my boy, efficiency. . . . That's my motto."
"You'll just ride her to Forres market next week, and see what you can get for her. I do think she's quieter since you took her in hand." "I'm sure she is but it winna laist a day. The moment I lea' her, she'll be as ill's ever," said the youth. "She has a kin' a likin' to me, 'cause I gi'e her sugar, an' she canna cast me; but she's no a bit better i' the hert o' her yet.
Again, Macbeth informs his wife that on his arrival at Forres, he made inquiry into the amount of reliance that could be placed in the utterances of the witches, "and learned by the perfectest report that they had more in them than mortal knowledge."
A "deck" of cards is produced and a quartette betake themselves to whist with half-crown stakes on the rubber and sixpenny points. This was mild speculation to that which was engaged in on the homeward journey after the market, when a Strathspey sheep-farmer won L8 between Dalvey and Forres.
The names of Macbeth and "the gentle Duncan" suggest the great drama which the genius of Shakespeare constructed from the magic tale of Hector Boece; but our path does not lie by the moor near Forres, nor past Birnam Wood or Dunsinane. Nor does the historian of the relations between England and Scotland have anything to tell about the English expedition to restore Malcolm.
I returned by the coast through Nairn, Forres, and so on, to Aberdeen, thence to Stonehive, where James Burness, from Montrose, met me by appointment. I spent two days among our relations, and found our aunts, Jean and Isabel, still alive, and hale old women. John Cairn, though born the same year with our father, walks as vigorously as I can: they have had several letters from his son in New York.
Allan, of Forres, who visited these islands, informs me that there is no deep water between the reefs and the shore. The above specified points have been coloured red.
At Forres we first hear Gaelic; for a train from Carr Bridge and Grantown in Upper Strathspey has come down the Highland Railway to join ours, and the red-haired Grants around the Rock of Craigellachie where a man whose name is not Grant is regarded as a lusus naturae are Gaelic speakers to a man.
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