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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of Angling Sketches, by Andrew Lang
+#21 in our series by Andrew Lang
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+Angling Sketches
+
+by Andrew Lang
+
+January, 2000 [Etext #2022]
+
+
+The Project Gutenberg Etext of Angling Sketches, by Andrew Lang
+*****This file should be named angsk10.txt or angsk10.zip******
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+This etext was prepared by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
+from the 1895 Longmans, Green, and Co. edition.
+
+
+
+
+
+ANGLING SKETCHES
+
+
+
+
+Contents:
+
+Preface
+Note to New Edition
+The Confessions of a Duffer
+A Border Boyhood
+Loch Awe
+Loch-Fishing
+Loch Leven
+The Bloody Doctor
+The Lady or the Salmon?
+A Tweedside Sketch
+The Double Alibi
+The Complete Bungler
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+
+Several of the sketches in this volume have appeared in
+periodicals.  "The Bloody Doctor" was in Macmillan's Magazine, "The
+Confessions of a Duffer," "Loch Awe," and "The Lady or the Salmon?"
+were in the Fishing Gazette, but have been to some extent re-
+written.  "The Double Alibi" was in Longman's Magazine.  The author
+has to thank the Editors and Publishers for permission to reprint
+these papers.
+
+The gem engraved on the cover is enlarged from a small intaglio in
+the collection of Mr. M. H. N. STORY-MASKELYNE, M.P.  Such gems
+were recommended by Clemens of Alexandria to the early Christians.
+"The figure of a man fishing will put them in mind of the Apostle."
+Perhaps the Greek is using the red hackle described by AElian in
+the only known Greek reference to fly-fishing.
+
+
+
+
+NOTE TO NEW EDITION
+
+
+
+The historical version of the Black Officer's career, very unlike
+the legend in "Loch Awe," may be read in Mr. Macpherson's Social
+Life in the Highlands.
+
+
+
+
+THE CONFESSIONS OF A DUFFER
+
+
+
+These papers do not boast of great sport.  They are truthful, not
+like the tales some fishers tell.  They should appeal to many
+sympathies.  There is no false modesty in the confidence with which
+I esteem myself a duffer, at fishing.  Some men are born duffers;
+others, unlike persons of genius, become so by an infinite capacity
+for not taking pains.  Others, again, among whom I would rank
+myself, combine both these elements of incompetence.  Nature, that
+made me enthusiastically fond of fishing, gave me thumbs for
+fingers, short-sighted eyes, indolence, carelessness, and a temper
+which (usually sweet and angelic) is goaded to madness by the laws
+of matter and of gravitation.  For example:  when another man is
+caught up in a branch he disengages his fly; I jerk at it till
+something breaks.  As for carelessness, in boyhood I fished, by
+preference, with doubtful gut and knots ill-tied; it made the risk
+greater, and increased the excitement if one did hook a trout.  I
+can't keep a fly-book.  I stuff the flies into my pockets at
+random, or stick them into the leaves of a novel, or bestow them in
+the lining of my hat or the case of my rods.  Never, till 1890, in
+all my days did I possess a landing-net.  If I can drag a fish up a
+bank, or over the gravel, well; if not, he goes on his way
+rejoicing.  On the Test I thought it seemly to carry a landing-net.
+It had a hinge, and doubled up.  I put the handle through a
+buttonhole of my coat:  I saw a big fish rising, I put a dry fly
+over him; the idiot took it.  Up stream he ran, then down stream,
+then he yielded to the rod and came near me.  I tried to unship my
+landing-net from my button-hole.  Vain labour!  I twisted and
+turned the handle, it would not budge.  Finally, I stooped, and
+attempted to ladle the trout out with the short net; but he broke
+the gut, and went off.  A landing-net is a tedious thing to carry,
+so is a creel, and a creel is, to me, a superfluity.  There is
+never anything to put in it.  If I do catch a trout, I lay him
+under a big stone, cover him with leaves, and never find him again.
+I often break my top joint; so, as I never carry string, I splice
+it with a bit of the line, which I bite off, for I really cannot be
+troubled with scissors and I always lose my knife.  When a phantom
+minnow sticks in my clothes, I snap the gut off, and put on
+another, so that when I reach home I look as if a shoal of fierce
+minnows had attacked me and hung on like leeches.  When a boy, I
+was--once or twice--a bait-fisher, but I never carried worms in box
+or bag.  I found them under big stones, or in the fields, wherever
+I had the luck.  I never tie nor otherwise fasten the joints of my
+rod; they often slip out of the sockets and splash into the water.
+Mr. Hardy, however, has invented a joint-fastening which never
+slips.  On the other hand, by letting the joint rust, you may find
+it difficult to take down your rod.  When I see a trout rising, I
+always cast so as to get hung up, and I frighten him as I disengage
+my hook.  I invariably fall in and get half-drowned when I wade,
+there being an insufficiency of nails in the soles of my brogues.
+My waders let in water, too, and when I go out to fish I usually
+leave either my reel, or my flies, or my rod, at home.  Perhaps no
+other man's average of lost flies in proportion to taken trout was
+ever so great as mine.  I lose plenty, by striking furiously, after
+a series of short rises, and breaking the gut, with which the fish
+swims away.  As to dressing a fly, one would sooner think of
+dressing a dinner.  The result of the fly-dressing would resemble a
+small blacking-brush, perhaps, but nothing entomological.
+
+Then why, a persevering reader may ask, do I fish?  Well, it is
+stronger than myself, the love of fishing; perhaps it is an
+inherited instinct, without the inherited power.  I may have had a
+fishing ancestor who bequeathed to me the passion without the art.
+My vocation is fixed, and I have fished to little purpose all my
+days.  Not for salmon, an almost fabulous and yet a stupid fish,
+which must be moved with a rod like a weaver's beam.  The trout is
+more delicate and dainty--not the sea-trout, which any man, woman,
+or child can capture, but the yellow trout in clear water.
+
+A few rises are almost all I ask for:  to catch more than half a
+dozen fish does not fall to my lot twice a year.  Of course, in a
+Sutherland loch one man is as good as another, the expert no better
+than the duffer.  The fish will take, or they won't.  If they
+won't, nobody can catch them; if they will, nobody can miss them.
+It is as simple as trolling a minnow from a boat in Loch Leven,
+probably the lowest possible form of angling.  My ambition is as
+great as my skill is feeble; to capture big trout with the dry fly
+in the Test, that would content me, and nothing under that.  But I
+can't see the natural fly on the water; I cannot see my own fly,
+
+
+Let it sink or let it swim.
+
+
+I often don't see the trout rise to me, if he is such a fool as to
+rise; and I can't strike in time when I do see him.  Besides, I am
+unteachable to tie any of the orthodox knots in the gut; it takes
+me half an hour to get the gut through one of these newfangled iron
+eyes, and, when it is through, I knot it any way.  The "jam" knot
+is a name to me, and no more.  That, perhaps, is why the hooks
+crack off so merrily.  Then, if I do spot a rising trout, and if he
+does not spot me as I crawl like the serpent towards him, my fly
+always fixes in a nettle, a haycock, a rose-bush, or whatnot,
+behind me.  I undo it, or break it, and put up another, make a
+cast, and, "plop," all the line falls in with a splash that would
+frighten a crocodile.  The fish's big black fin goes cutting the
+stream above, and there is a sauve qui peut of trout in all
+directions.
+
+I once did manage to make a cast correctly:  the fly went over the
+fish's nose; he rose; I hooked him, and he was a great silly brute
+of a grayling.  The grayling is the deadest-hearted and the
+foolishest-headed fish that swims.  I would as lief catch a perch
+or an eel as a grayling.  This is the worst of it--this ambition of
+the duffer's, this desire for perfection, as if the golfing
+imbecile should match himself against Mr. Horace Hutchinson, or as
+the sow of the Greek proverb challenged Athene to sing.  I know it
+all, I deplore it, I regret the evils of ambition; but c'est plus
+fort que moi.  If there is a trout rising well under the pendant
+boughs that trail in the water, if there is a brake of briars
+behind me, a strong wind down stream, for that trout, in that
+impregnable situation, I am impelled to fish.  If I raise him I
+strike, miss him, catch up in his tree, swish the cast off into the
+briars, break my top, break my heart, but--that is the humour of
+it.  The passion, or instinct, being in all senses blind, must no
+doubt be hereditary.  It is full of sorrow and bitterness and hope
+deferred, and entails the mockery of friends, especially of the
+fair.  But I would as soon lay down a love of books as a love of
+fishing.
+
+Success with pen or rod may be beyond one, but there is the
+pleasure of the pursuit, the rapture of endeavour, the delight of
+an impossible chase, the joys of nature--sky, trees, brooks, and
+birds.  Happiness in these things is the legacy to us of the
+barbarian.  Man in the future will enjoy bricks, asphalte, fog,
+machinery, "society," even picture galleries, as many men and most
+women do already.  We are fortunate who inherit the older, not "the
+new spirit"--we who, skilled or unskilled, follow in the steps of
+our father, Izaak, by streams less clear, indeed, and in meadows
+less fragrant, than his.  Still, they are meadows and streams, not
+wholly dispeopled yet of birds and trout; nor can any defect of
+art, nor certainty of laborious disappointment, keep us from the
+waterside when April comes.
+
+Next to being an expert, it is well to be a contented duffer:  a
+man who would fish if he could, and who will pleasure himself by
+flicking off his flies, and dreaming of impossible trout, and
+smoking among the sedges Hope's enchanted cigarettes.  Next time we
+shall be more skilled, more fortunate.  Next time!  "To-morrow, and
+to-morrow, and to-morrow."  Grey hairs come, and stiff limbs, and
+shortened sight; but the spring is green and hope is fresh for all
+the changes in the world and in ourselves.  We can tell a hawk from
+a hand-saw, a March Brown from a Blue Dun; and if our success be as
+poor as ever, our fancy can dream as well as ever of better things
+and more fortunate chances.  For fishing is like life; and in the
+art of living, too, there are duffers, though they seldom give us
+their confessions.  Yet even they are kept alive, like the
+incompetent angler, by this undying hope:  they will be more
+careful, more skilful, more lucky next time.  The gleaming
+untravelled future, the bright untried waters, allure us from day
+to day, from pool to pool, till, like the veteran on Coquet side,
+we "try a farewell throw," or, like Stoddart, look our last on
+Tweed.
+
+
+
+A BORDER BOYHOOD
+
+
+
+A fisher, says our father Izaak, is like a poet:  he "must be born
+so."  The majority of dwellers on the Border are born to be
+fishers, thanks to the endless number of rivers and burns in the
+region between the Tweed and the Coquet--a realm where almost all
+trout-fishing is open, and where, since population and love of the
+sport have increased, there is now but little water that merits the
+trouble of putting up a rod.
+
+Like the rest of us in that country, I was born an angler, though
+under an evil star, for, indeed, my labours have not been blessed,
+and are devoted to fishing rather than to the catching of fish.
+Remembrance can scarcely recover, "nor time bring back to time,"
+the days when I was not busy at the waterside; yet the feat is not
+quite beyond the power of Mnemosyne.  My first recollection of the
+sport must date from about the age of four.  I recall, in a dim
+brightness, driving along a road that ran between banks of bracken
+and mica-veined rocks, and the sunlight on a shining bend of a
+highland stream, and my father, standing in the shallow water,
+showing me a huge yellow fish, that gave its last fling or two on
+the grassy bank.  The fish seemed as terrible and dangerous to me
+as to Tobit, in the Apocrypha, did that ferocious half-pounder
+which he carries on a string in the early Italian pictures.  How
+oddly Botticelli and his brethren misconceived the man-devouring
+fish, which must have been a crocodile strayed from the Nile into
+the waters of the Euphrates!  A half-pounder!  To have been
+terrified by a trout seems a bad beginning; and, thereafter, the
+mist gather's over the past, only to lift again when I see myself,
+with a crowd of other little children, sent to fish, with crooked
+pins, for minnows, or "baggies" as we called them, in the Ettrick.
+If our parents hoped that we would bring home minnows for bait,
+they were disappointed.  The party was under the command of a
+nursery governess, and probably she was no descendant of the mother
+of us all, Dame Juliana Berners.  We did not catch any minnows, and
+I remember sitting to watch a bigger boy, who was angling in a
+shoal of them when a parr came into the shoal, and we had bright
+visions of alluring that monarch of the deep.  But the parr
+disdained our baits, and for months I dreamed of what it would have
+been to capture him, and often thought of him in church.  In a
+moment of profane confidence my younger brother once asked me:
+"What do YOU do in sermon time?  I," said he in a whisper--"mind
+you don't tell--I tell stories to myself about catching trout."  To
+which I added similar confession, for even so I drove the sermon
+by, and I have not "told"--till now.
+
+By this time we must have been introduced to trout.  Who forgets
+his first trout?  Mine, thanks to that unlucky star, was a double
+deception, or rather there were two kinds of deception.  A village
+carpenter very kindly made rods for us.  They were of unpainted
+wood, these first rods; they were in two pieces, with a real brass
+joint, and there was a ring at the end of the top joint, to which
+the line was knotted.  We were still in the age of Walton, who
+clearly knew nothing, except by hearsay, of a reel; he abandons the
+attempt to describe that machine as used by the salmon-fishers.  He
+thinks it must be seen to be understood.  With these innocent
+weapons, and with the gardener to bait our hooks, we were taken to
+the Yarrow, far up the stream, near Ladhope.  How well one
+remembers deserting the gardener, and already appreciating the joys
+of having no gillie nor attendant, of being "alone with ourselves
+and the goddess of fishing"!  I cast away as well as I could, and
+presently jerked a trout, a tiny one, high up in the air out of the
+water.  But he fell off the hook again, he dropped in with a little
+splash, and I rushed up to consult my tutor on his unsportsmanlike
+behaviour, and the disappointing, nay, heart-breaking, occurrence.
+Was the trout not morally caught, was there no way of getting him
+to see this and behave accordingly?  The gardener feared there was
+none.  Meanwhile he sat on the bank and angled in a pool.  "Try my
+rod," he said, and, as soon as I had taken hold of it, "pull up,"
+he cried, "pull up."  I did "pull up," and hauled my first
+troutling on shore.  But in my inmost heart I feared that he was
+not my trout at all, that the gardener had hooked him before he
+handed the rod to me.  Then we met my younger brother coming to us
+with quite a great fish, half a pound perhaps, which he had caught
+in a burn.  Then, for the first time, my soul knew the fierce
+passion of jealousy, the envy of the angler.  Almost for the last
+time, too; for, I know not why it is, and it proves me no true
+fisherman, I am not discontented by the successes of others.  If
+one cannot catch fish oneself, surely the next best thing is to see
+other people catch them.
+
+My own progress was now checked for long by a constitutional and
+insuperable aversion to angling with worm.  If the gardener, or a
+pretty girl-cousin of the mature age of fourteen, would put the
+worm on, I did not "much mind" fishing with it.  Dost thou
+remember, fair lady of the ringlets?  Still, I never liked bait-
+fishing, and these mine allies were not always at hand.  We used,
+indeed, to have great days with perch at Faldonside, on the land
+which Sir Walter Scott was always so anxious to buy from Mr. Nichol
+Milne.  Almost the last entry in his diary, at Naples, breathes
+this unutterable hope.  He had deluded himself into believing that
+his debts were paid, and that he could soon "speak a word to young
+Nichol Milne."  The word, of course, was never spoken, and the
+unsupplanted laird used to let us fish for his perch to our hearts'
+desire.  Never was there such slaughter.  The corks which we used
+as floats were perpetually tipping, bobbing, and disappearing, and
+then the red-finned perch would fly out on to dry land.  Here I
+once saw two corks go down, two anglers haul up, and one perch,
+attached to both hooks, descend on the grassy bank.  My brother and
+I filled two baskets once, and strung dozens of other perch on a
+stick.
+
+But this was not legitimate business.  Not till we came to fly-
+fishing were we really entered at the sport, and this initiation
+took place, as it chanced, beside the very stream where I was first
+shown a trout.  It is a charming piece of water, amber-coloured and
+clear, flowing from the Morvern hills under the limes of an ancient
+avenue--trees that have long survived the house to which, of old,
+the road must have led.  Our gillie put on for us big bright sea-
+trout flies--nobody fishes there for yellow trout; but, in our
+inexperience, small "brownies" were all we caught.  Probably we
+were only taken to streams and shallows where we could not
+interfere with mature sportsmen.  At all events, it was
+demonstrated to us that we could actually catch fish with fly, and
+since then I have scarcely touched a worm, except as a boy, in
+burns.  In these early days we had no notion of playing a trout.
+If there was a bite, we put our strength into an answering tug,
+and, if nothing gave way, the trout flew over our heads, perhaps up
+into a tree, perhaps over into a branch of the stream behind us.
+Quite a large trout will yield to this artless method, if the rod
+be sturdy--none of your glued-up cane-affairs.  I remember hooking
+a trout which, not answering to the first haul, ran right across
+the stream and made for a hole in the opposite bank.  But the
+second lift proved successful and he landed on my side of the
+water.  He had a great minnow in his throat, and must have been a
+particularly greedy animal.  Of course, on this system there were
+many breakages, and the method was abandoned as we lived into our
+teens, and began to wade and to understand something about fly-
+fishing.
+
+It was worth while to be a boy then in the south of Scotland, and
+to fish the waters haunted by old legends, musical with old songs,
+and renowned in the sporting essays of Christopher North and
+Stoddart.  Even then, thirty long years ago, the old stagers used
+to tell us that "the waiter was owr sair fished," and they grumbled
+about the system of draining the land, which makes a river a
+roaring torrent in floods, and a bed of grey stones with a few
+clear pools and shallows, during the rest of the year.  In times
+before the hills were drained, before the manufacturing towns were
+so populous, before pollution, netting, dynamiting, poisoning,
+sniggling, and the enormous increase of fair and unfair fishing,
+the border must have been the angler's paradise.  Still, it was not
+bad when we were boys.  We had Ettrick within a mile of us, and a
+finer natural trout-stream there is not in Scotland, though now the
+water only holds a sadly persecuted remnant.  There was one long
+pool behind Lindean, flowing beneath a high wooded bank, where the
+trout literally seemed never to cease rising at the flies that
+dropped from the pendant boughs.  Unluckily the water flowed out of
+the pool in a thin broad stream, directly it right angles to the
+pool itself.  Thus the angler had, so to speak, the whole of lower
+Ettrick at his back when he waded:  it was a long way up stream to
+the bank, and, as we never used landing-nets then, we naturally
+lost a great many trout in trying to unhook them in mid water.
+They only averaged as a rule from three to two to the pound, but
+they were strong and lively.  In this pool there was a large tawny,
+table-shaped stone, over which the current broke.  Out of the eddy
+behind this stone, one of my brothers one day caught three trout
+weighing over seven pounds, a feat which nowadays sounds quite
+incredible.  As soon as the desirable eddy was empty, another
+trout, a trifle smaller than the former, seems to have occupied it.
+The next mile and a half, from Lindean to the junction with Tweed,
+was remarkable for excellent sport.  In the last pool of Ettrick,
+the water flowed by a steep bank, and, if you cast almost on to the
+further side, you were perfectly safe to get fish, even when the
+river was very low.  The flies used, three on a cast, were small
+and dusky, hare's ear and woodcock wing, black palmers, or, as
+Stoddart sings,
+
+
+Wee dour looking huiks are the thing,
+Mouse body and laverock wing.
+
+
+Next to Ettrick came Tweed:  the former river joins the latter at
+the bend of a long stretch of water, half stream, half pool, in
+which angling was always good.  In late September there were sea-
+trout, which, for some reason, rose to the fly much more freely
+than sea-trout do now in the upper Tweed.  I particularly remember
+hooking one just under the railway bridge.  He was a two-pounder,
+and practised the usual sea-trout tactics of springing into the air
+like a rocket.  There was a knot on my line, of course, and I was
+obliged to hold him hard.  When he had been dragged up on the
+shingle, the line parted, broken in twain at the knot; but it had
+lasted just long enough, during three exciting minutes.  This
+accident of a knot on the line has only once befallen me since,
+with the strongest loch-trout I ever encountered.  It was on
+Branxholme Loch, where the trout run to a great size, but usually
+refuse the fly.  I was alone in a boat on a windy day; the trout
+soon ran out the line to the knot, and then there was nothing for
+it but to lower the top almost to the water's edge, and hold on in
+hope.  Presently the boat drifted ashore, and I landed him--better
+luck than I deserved.  People who only know the trout of the Test
+and other chalk streams, cannot imagine how much stronger are the
+fish of the swift Scottish streams and dark Scottish lochs.
+They're worse fed, but they are infinitely more powerful and
+active; it is all the difference between an alderman and a
+clansman.
+
+Tweed, at this time, was full of trout, but even then they were not
+easy to catch.  One difficulty lay in the nature of the wading.
+There is a pool near Ashiesteil and Gleddis Weil which illustrated
+this.  Here Scott and Hogg were once upset from a boat while
+"burning the water"--spearing salmon by torchlight.  Herein, too,
+as Scott mentions in his Diary, he once caught two trout at one
+cast.  The pool is long, is paved with small gravel, and allures
+you to wade on and on.  But the water gradually deepens as you go
+forward, and the pool ends in a deep pot under each bank.  Then to
+recover your ground becomes by no means easy, especially if the
+water is heavy.  You get half-drowned, or drowned altogether,
+before you discover your danger.  Many of the pools have this
+peculiarity, and in many, one step made rashly lets you into a very
+uncomfortable and perilous place.  Therefore expeditions to
+Tweedside were apt to end in a ducking.  It was often hard to reach
+the water where trout were rising, and the rise was always
+capricious.  There might not be a stir on the water for hours, and
+suddenly it would be all boiling with heads and tails for twenty
+minutes, after which nothing was to be done.  To miss "the take"
+was to waste the day, at least in fly-fishing.  From a high wooded
+bank I have seen the trout feeding, and they have almost ceased to
+feed before I reached the waterside.  Still worse was it to be
+allured into water over the tops of your waders, early in the day,
+and then to find that the rise was over, and there was nothing for
+it but a weary walk home, the basket laden only with damp boots.
+Still, the trout were undeniably THERE, and that was a great
+encouragement.  They are there still, but infinitely more cunning
+than of old.  Then, if they were feeding, they took the artificial
+fly freely; now it must be exactly of the right size and shade or
+they will have none of it.  They come provokingly short, too; just
+plucking at the hook, and running out a foot of line or so, then
+taking their departure.  For some reason the Tweed is more
+difficult to fish with the dry fly than--the Test, for example.
+The water is swifter and very dark, it drowns the fly soon, and on
+the surface the fly is less easily distinguished than at
+Whitchurch, in the pellucid streams.  The Leader a tributary, may
+be fished with dry fly; on the Tweed one can hardly manage it.
+There is a plan by which rising trout may be taken--namely, by
+baiting with a small red worm and casting as in fly-fishing.  But
+that is so hard on the worm!  Probably he who can catch trout with
+fly on the Tweed between Melrose and Holy Lee can catch them
+anywhere.  On a good day in April great baskets are still made in
+preserved parts of the Tweed, but, if they are made in open water,
+it must be, I fancy, with worm, or with the "screw," the lava of
+the May-fly.  The screw is a hideous and venomous-looking animal,
+which is fixed on a particular kind of tackle, and cast up stream
+with a short line.  The heaviest trout are fond of it, but it can
+only be used at a season when either school or Oxford keeps one far
+from what old Franck, Walton's contemporary, a Cromwellian trooper,
+calls "the glittering and resolute streams of Tweed."
+
+Difficult as it is, that river is so beautiful and alluring that it
+scarcely needs the attractions of sport.  The step banks,
+beautifully wooded, and in spring one mass of primroses, are
+crowned here and there with ruined Border towers--like Elibank, the
+houses of Muckle Mou'ed Meg; or with fair baronial houses like
+Fernilea.  Meg made a bad exchange when she left Elibank with the
+salmon pool at its foot for bleak Harden, frowning over the narrow
+"den" where Harden kept the plundered cattle.  There is no fishing
+in the tiny Harden burn, that joins the brawling Borthwick Water.
+
+The burns of the Lowlands are now almost barren of trout.  The
+spawning fish, flabby and useless, are killed in winter.  All
+through the rest of the year, in the remotest places, tourists are
+hard at them with worm.  In a small burn a skilled wormer may
+almost depopulate the pools, and, on the Border, all is fish that
+comes to the hook; men keep the very fingerlings, on the pretext
+that they are "so sweet" in the frying-pan.  The crowd of anglers
+in glens which seem not easily accessible is provoking enough.
+Into the Meggat, a stream which feeds St. Mary's Loch, there flows
+the Glengaber, or Glencaber burn:  the burn of the pine-tree stump.
+The water runs in deep pools and streams over a blue slatey rock,
+which contains gold under the sand, in the worn holes and crevices.
+My friend, Mr. McAllister, the schoolmaster at St. Mary's, tells me
+that one day, when fish were not rising, he scooped out the gravel
+of one of these holes with his knife, and found a tiny nugget,
+after which the gold-hunting fever came on him for a while.  But
+little is got nowadays, though in some earlier period the burn has
+been diverted from its bed, and the people used solemnly to wash
+the sand, as in California or Australia.  Well, whether in
+consequence of the gold, as the alchemical philosophers would have
+held, or not, the trout of the Glengaber burn were good.  They were
+far shorter, thicker and stronger than those of the many
+neighbouring brooks.  I have fished up the burn with fly, when it
+was very low, hiding carefully behind the boulders, and have been
+surprised at the size and gameness of the fish.  As soon as the fly
+had touched the brown water, it was sucked down, and there was
+quite a fierce little fight before the fish came to hand.
+
+"This, all this, was in the olden time, long ago."
+
+The Glengaber burn is about twenty miles from any railway station,
+but, on the last occasion when I visited it, three louts were
+worming their way up it, within twenty yards of each other, each
+lout, with his huge rod, showing himself wholly to any trout that
+might be left in the water.  Thirty years ago the burns that feed
+St. Mary's Loch were almost unfished, and rare sport we had in
+them, as boys, staying at Tibbie Sheil's famous cottage, and
+sleeping in her box-beds, where so often the Ettrick Shepherd and
+Christopher North have lain, after copious toddy.  "'Tis gone, 'tis
+gone:" not in our time will any man, like the Ettrick Shepherd,
+need a cart to carry the trout he has slain in Meggat Water.  That
+stream, flowing through a valley furnished with a grass-grown track
+for a road, flows, as I said, into St. Mary's Loch.  There are two
+or three large pools at the foot of the loch, in which, as a small
+boy hardly promoted to fly, I have seen many monsters rising
+greedily.  Men got into the way of fishing these pools after a
+flood with minnow, and thereby made huge baskets, the big fish
+running up to feed, out of the loch.  But, when last I rowed past
+Meggat foot, the delta of that historic stream was simply crowded
+with anglers, stepping in in front of each other.  I asked if this
+mob was a political "demonstration," but they stuck to business, as
+if they had been on the Regent's Canal.  And this, remember, was
+twenty miles from any town!  Yet there is a burn on the Border
+still undiscovered, still full of greedy trout.  I shall give the
+angler such a hint of its whereabouts as Tiresias, in Hades, gave
+to Odysseus concerning the end of his second wanderings.
+
+When, O stranger, thou hast reached a burn where the shepherd asks
+thee for the newspaper wrapped round thy sandwiches, that he may
+read the news, then erect an altar to Priapus, god of fishermen,
+and begin to angle boldly.
+
+Probably the troops who fish our Border-burns still manage to toss
+out some dozens of tiny fishes, some six or eight to the pound.
+Are not these triumphs chronicled in the "Scotsman?"  But they
+cannot imagine what angling was in the dead years, nor what great
+trout dwelt below the linns of the Crosscleugh burn, beneath the
+red clusters of the rowan trees, or in the waters of the "Little
+Yarrow" above the Loch of the Lowes.  As to the lochs themselves,
+now that anyone may put a boat on them, now that there is perpetual
+trolling, as well as fly-fishing, so that every fish knows the
+lures, the fun is mainly over.  In April, no doubt, something may
+still be done, and in the silver twilights of June, when as you
+drift on the still surface you hear the constant sweet plash of the
+rising trout, a few, and these good, may be taken.  But the water
+wants re-stocking, and the burns in winter need watching, in the
+interests of spawning fish.  It is nobody's interest, that I know
+of, to take trouble and incur expense; and free fishing, by the
+constitution of the universe, must end in bad fishing or in none at
+all.  The best we can say for it is that vast numbers of persons
+may, by the still waters of these meres, enjoy the pleasures of
+hope.  Even solitude is no longer to be found in the scene which
+Scott, in "Marmion," chooses as of all places the most solitary.
+
+
+Here, have I thought, 'twere sweet to dwell,
+And rear again the chaplain's cell.
+
+
+But no longer does
+
+
+"Your horse's hoof tread sound too rude,
+So stilly is the solitude."
+
+
+Stilly! with the horns and songs from omnibusses that carry
+tourists, and with yells from nymphs and swains disporting
+themselves in the boats.  Yarrow is only the old Yarrow in winter.
+Ages and revolutions must pass before the ancient peace returns;
+and only if the golden age is born again, and if we revive in it,
+shall we find St. Mary's what St. Mary's was lang syne -
+
+
+Ah, Buddha, if thy tale be true,
+Of still returning life,
+A monk may I be born anew,
+In valleys free from strife, -
+A monk where Meggat winds and laves
+The lone St. Mary's of the Waves.
+
+
+Yarrow, which flows out of St. Mary's Loch was never a great
+favourite of mine, as far as fishing goes.  It had, and probably
+deserved, a great reputation, and some good trout are still taken
+in the upper waters, and there must be monsters in the deep black
+pools, the "dowie dens" above Bowhill.  But I never had any luck
+there.  The choicest stream of all was then, probably, the Aill,
+described by Sir Walter in "William of Deloraine's Midnight Ride" -
+
+
+Where Aill, from mountains freed,
+Down from the lakes did raving come;
+Each wave was crested with tawny foam,
+Like the mane of a chestnut steed.
+
+
+As not uncommonly happens, Scott uses rather large language here.
+The steepy, grassy hillsides, the great green tablelands in a
+recess of which the Aill is born, can hardly be called "mountains."
+The "lakes," too, through which it passes, are much more like
+tarns, or rather, considering the flatness of their banks, like
+well-meaning ponds.  But the Aill, near Sinton and Ashkirk, was a
+delightful trout-stream, between its willow-fringed banks, a brook
+about the size of the Lambourne.  Nowhere on the Border were trout
+more numerous, better fed, and more easily beguiled.  A week on
+Test would I gladly give for one day of boyhood beside the Aill,
+where the casting was not scientific, but where the fish rose
+gamely at almost any fly.  Nobody seemed to go there then, and, I
+fancy, nobody need go there now.  The nets and other dismal devices
+of the poachers from the towns have ruined that pleasant brook,
+where one has passed so many a happy hour, walking the long way
+home wet and weary, but well content.  Into Aill flows a burn, the
+Headshaw burn, where there used to be good fish, because it runs
+out of Headshaw Loch, a weed-fringed lonely tarn on the bleak level
+of the tableland.  Bleak as it may seem, Headshaw Loch has the
+great charm of absolute solitude:  there are no tourists nor
+anglers here, and the life of the birds is especially free and
+charming.  The trout, too, are large, pink of flesh, and game of
+character; but the world of mankind need not rush thither.  They
+are not to be captured by the wiles of men, or so rarely that the
+most enthusiastic anglers have given them up.  They are as safe in
+their tarn as those enchanted fish of the "Arabian Nights."
+Perhaps a silver sedge in a warm twilight may somewhat avail, but
+the adventure is rarely achieved.
+
+These are the waters with which our boyhood was mainly engaged; it
+is a pleasure to name and number them.  Memory, that has lost so
+much and would gladly lose so much more, brings vividly back the
+golden summer evenings by Tweedside, when the trout began to plash
+in the stillness--brings back the long, lounging, solitary days
+beneath the woods of Ashiesteil--days so lonely that they
+sometimes, in the end, begat a superstitious eeriness.  One seemed
+forsaken in an enchanted world; one might see the two white fairy
+deer flit by, bringing to us, as to Thomas Rhymer, the tidings that
+we must back to Fairyland.  Other waters we knew well, and loved:
+the little salmon-stream in the west that doubles through the loch,
+and runs a mile or twain beneath its alders, past its old Celtic
+battle-field, beneath the ruined shell of its feudal tower, to the
+sea.  Many a happy day we had there, on loch or stream, with the
+big sea-trout which have somehow changed their tastes, and to-day
+take quite different flies from the green body and the red body
+that led them to the landing-net long ago.  Dear are the twin
+Alines, but dearer is Tweed, and Ettrick, where our ancestor was
+drowned in a flood, and his white horse was found, next day,
+feeding near his dead body, on a little grassy island.  There is a
+great pleasure in trying new methods, in labouring after the
+delicate art of the dry fly-fisher in the clear Hampshire streams,
+where the glassy tide flows over the waving tresses of crow's-foot
+below the poplar shade.  But nothing can be so good as what is old,
+and, as far as angling goes, is practically ruined, the alternate
+pool and stream of the Border waters, where
+
+
+The triple pride
+Of Eildon looks over Strathclyde,
+
+
+and the salmon cast murmurs hard by the Wizard's grave.  They are
+all gone now, the old allies and tutors in the angler's art--the
+kind gardener who baited our hooks; the good Scotch judge who gave
+us our first collection of flies; the friend who took us with him
+on his salmon-fishing expedition, and made men of us with real
+rods, and "pirns" of ancient make.  The companions of those times
+are scattered, and live under strange stars and in converse
+seasons, by troutless waters.  It is no longer the height of
+pleasure to be half-drowned in Tweed, or lost on the hills with no
+luncheon in the basket.  But, except for scarcity of fish, the
+scene is very little altered, and one is a boy again, in heart,
+beneath the elms of Yair, or by the Gullets at Ashiesteil.  However
+bad the sport, it keeps you young, or makes you young again, and
+you need not follow Ponce de Leon to the western wilderness, when,
+in any river you knew of yore, you can find the Fountain of Youth.
+
+
+
+LOCH AWE--THE BOATMAN'S YARNS
+
+
+
+Good trout-fishing in Scotland, south of the Pentland Firth, is
+almost impossible to procure.  There are better fish, and more of
+them, in the Wandle, within twenty minutes of Victoria Station,
+than in any equal stretch of any Scotch river with which I am
+acquainted.  But the pleasure of angling, luckily, does not consist
+merely of the catching of fish.  The Wandle is rather too suburban
+for some tastes, which prefer smaller trout, better air, and wilder
+scenery.  To such spirits, Loch Awe may, with certain distinct
+cautions, be recommended.  There is more chance for anglers, now,
+in Scotch lochs than in most Scotch rivers.  The lochs cannot so
+easily be netted, lined, polluted, and otherwise made empty and
+ugly, like the Border streams.  They are farther off from towns and
+tourists, though distance is scarcely a complete protection.  The
+best lochs for yellow trout are decidedly those of Sutherland.
+There are no railways, and there are two hundred lochs and more in
+the Parish of Assynt.  There, in June, the angler who is a good
+pedestrian may actually enjoy solitude, sometimes.  There is a loch
+near Strathnaver, and far from human habitations, where a friend of
+my own recently caught sixty-five trout weighing about thirty-eight
+pounds.  They are numerous and plucky, but not large, though a
+casual big loch-trout may be taken by trolling.  But it is truly a
+far way to this anonymous lake and all round the regular fishing
+inns, like Inchnadampf and Forsinard there is usually quite a
+little crowd of anglers.  The sport is advertised in the
+newspapers; more and more of our eager fellow-creatures are
+attracted, more and more the shooting tenants are preserving waters
+that used to be open.  The distance to Sutherland makes that county
+almost beyond the range of a brief holiday.  Loch Leven is nearer,
+and at Loch Leven the scenery is better than its reputation, while
+the trout are excellent, though shy.  But Loch Leven is too much
+cockneyfied by angling competitions; moreover, its pleasures are
+expensive.  Loch Awe remains, a loch at once large, lovely, not too
+distant, and not destitute of sport.
+
+The reader of Mr. Colquhoun's delightful old book, "The Moor and
+the Loch," must not expect Loch Awe to be what it once was.  The
+railway, which has made the north side of the lake so ugly, has
+brought the district within easy reach of Glasgow and of Edinburgh.
+Villas are built on many a beautiful height; here couples come for
+their honeymoon, here whole argosies of boats are anchored off the
+coasts, here do steam launches ply.  The hotels are extremely
+comfortable, the boatmen are excellent boatmen, good fishers, and
+capital company.  All this is pleasant, but all this attracts
+multitudes of anglers, and it is not in nature that sport should be
+what it once was.  Of the famous salmo ferox I cannot speak from
+experience.  The huge courageous fish is still at home in Loch Awe,
+but now he sees a hundred baits, natural and artificial, where he
+saw one in Mr. Colquhoun's time.  The truly contemplative man may
+still sit in the stern of the boat, with two rods out, and possess
+his soul in patience, as if he were fishing for tarpon in Florida.
+I wish him luck, but the diversion is little to my mind.  Except in
+playing the fish, if he comes, all the skill is in the boatmen, who
+know where to row, at what pace, and in what depth of water.  As to
+the chances of salmon again, they are perhaps less rare, but they
+are not very frequent.  The fish does not seem to take freely in
+the loch, and on his way from the Awe to the Orchy.  As to the
+trout-fishing, it is very bad in the months when most men take
+their holidays, August and September.  From the middle of April to
+the middle of June is apparently the best time.  The loch is well
+provided with bays, of different merit, according to the feeding
+which they provide; some come earlier, some later into season.
+Doubtless the most beautiful part of the lake is around the
+islands, between the Loch Awe and the Port Sonachan hotels.  The
+Green Island, with its strange Celtic burying-ground, where the
+daffodils bloom among the sepulchres with their rude carvings of
+battles and of armed men, has many trout around its shores.  The
+favourite fishing-places, however, are between Port Sonachan and
+Ford.  In the morning early, the steam-launch tows a fleet of boats
+down the loch, and they drift back again, fishing all the bays, and
+arriving at home in time for dinner.  Too frequently the angler is
+vexed by finding a boat busy in his favourite bay.  I am not sure
+that, when the trout are really taking, the water near Port
+Sonachan is not as good as any other.  Much depends on the weather.
+In the hard north-east winds of April we can scarcely expect trout
+to feed very freely anywhere.  These of Loch Awe are very peculiar
+fish.  I take it that there are two species--one short, thick,
+golden, and beautiful; but these, at least in April, are decidedly
+scarce.  The common sort is long, lanky, of a dark green hue, and
+the reverse of lovely.  Most of them, however, are excellent at
+breakfast, pink in the flesh, and better flavoured, I think, than
+the famous trout of Loch Leven.  They are also extremely game for
+their size; a half-pound trout fights like a pounder.  From thirty
+to forty fish in a day's incessant angling is reckoned no bad
+basket.  In genial May weather, probably the trout average two to
+the pound, and a pounder or two may be in the dish.  But three to
+the pound is decidedly nearer the average, at least in April.  The
+flies commonly used are larger than what are employed in Loch
+Leven.  A teal wing and red body, a grouse hackle, and the
+prismatic Heckham Peckham are among the favourites; but it is said
+that flies no bigger than Tweed flies are occasionally successful.
+In my own brief experience I have found the trout "dour,"
+occasionally they would rise freely for an hour at noon, or in the
+evening; but often one passed hours with scarcely a rising fish.
+This may have been due to the bitterness of the weather, or to my
+own lack of skill.  Not that lochs generally require much artifice
+in the angler.  To sink the flies deep, and move them with short
+jerks, appears, now and then, to be efficacious.  There has been
+some controversy about Loch Awe trouting; this is as favourable a
+view of the sport as I can honestly give.  It is not excellent,
+but, thanks to the great beauty of the scenery, the many points of
+view on so large and indented a lake, the charm of the wood and
+wild flowers, Loch Awe is well worth a visit from persons who do
+not pitch their hopes too high.
+
+Loch Awe would have contented me less had I been less fortunate in
+my boatman.  It is often said that tradition has died out in the
+Highlands; it is living yet.
+
+After three days of north wind and failure, it occurred to me that
+my boatman might know the local folklore--the fairy tales and
+traditions.  As a rule, tradition is a purely professional part of
+a guide's stock-in-trade, but the angler who had my barque in his
+charge proved to be a fresh fountain of legend.  His own county is
+not Argyleshire, but Inverness, and we did not deal much in local
+myth.  True, he told me why Loch Awe ceased--like the site of Sodom
+and Gomorrah--to be a cultivated valley and became a lake, where
+the trout are small and, externally, green.
+
+"Loch Awe was once a fertile valley, and it belonged to an old
+dame.  She was called Dame Cruachan, the same as the hill, and she
+lived high up on the hill-side.  Now there was a well on the hill-
+side, and she was always to cover up the well with a big stone
+before the sun set.  But one day she had been working in the valley
+and she was weary, and she sat down by the path on her way home and
+fell asleep.  And the sun had gone down before she reached the
+well, and in the night the water broke out and filled all the
+plain, and what was land is now water."  This, then, was the origin
+of Loch Awe.  It is a little like the Australian account of the
+Deluge.  That calamity was produced by a man's showing a woman the
+mystic turndun, a native sacred toy.  Instantly water broke out of
+the earth and drowned everybody.
+
+This is merely a local legend, such as boatmen are expected to
+know.  As the green trout utterly declined to rise, I tried the
+boatman with the Irish story of why the Gruagach Gaire left off
+laughing, and all about the hare that came and defiled his table,
+as recited by Mr. Curtin in his "Irish Legends" (Sampson, Low, &
+Co.).  The boatman did not know this fable, but he did know of a
+red deer that came and spoke to a gentleman.  This was a story from
+the Macpherson country.  I give it first in the boatman's words,
+and then we shall discuss the history of the legend as known to Sir
+Walter Scott and James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd.
+
+
+THE YARN OF THE BLACK OFFICER
+
+
+"It was about 'the last Christmas of the hundred'--the end of last
+century.  They wanted men for the Black Watch (42nd Highlanders),
+and the Black Officer, as they called him, was sent to his own
+country to enlist them.  Some he got willingly, and others by
+force.  He promised he would only take them to London, where the
+King wanted to review them, and then let them go home.  So they
+came, though they little liked it, and he was marching them south.
+Now at night they reached a place where nobody would have halted
+them except the Black Officer, for it was a great place for ghosts.
+And they would have run away if they had dared, but they were
+afraid of him.  So some tried to sleep in threes and fours, and
+some were afraid to sleep, and they sat up round the fire.  But the
+Black Officer, he went some way from the rest, and lay down beneath
+a tree.
+
+"Now as the night wore on, and whiles it would be dark and whiles
+the moon shone, a man came--they did not know from where--a big red
+man, and drew up to the fire, and was talking with them.  And he
+asked where the Black Officer was, and they showed him.  Now there
+was one man, Shamus Mackenzie they called him, and he was very
+curious, and he must be seeing what they did.  So he followed the
+man, and saw him stoop and speak to the officer, but he did not
+waken; then this individual took the Black Officer by the breast
+and shook him violently.  Then Shamus knew who the stranger was,
+for no man alive durst have done as much to the Black Officer.  And
+there was the Black Officer kneeling to him!
+
+"Well, what they said, Shamus could not hear, and presently they
+walked away, and the Black Officer came back alone.
+
+"He took them to England, but never to London, and they never saw
+the King.  He took them to Portsmouth, and they were embarked for
+India, where we were fighting the French.  There was a town we
+couldn't get into" (Seringapatam?), "and the Black Officer
+volunteered to make a tunnel under the walls.  Now they worked
+three days, and whether it was the French heard them and let them
+dig on, or not, any way, on the third day the French broke in on
+them.  They kept sending men into the tunnel, and more men, and
+still they wondered who was fighting within, and how we could have
+so large a party in the tunnel; so at last they brought torches,
+and there was no man alive on our side but the Black Officer, and
+he had a wall of corpses built up in front of him, and was fighting
+across it.  He had more light to see by than the French had, for it
+was dark behind him, and there would be some light on their side.
+So at last they brought some combustibles and blew it all up.
+Three days after that we took the town.  Some of our soldiers were
+sent to dig out the tunnel, and with them was Shamus Mackenzie."
+
+"And they never found the Black Officer," I said, thinking of young
+Campbell in Sekukoeni's fighting koppie.
+
+"Oh, yes," said the boatman, "Shamus found the body of the Black
+Officer, all black with smoke, and he laid him down on a green
+knoll, and was standing over the dead man, and was thinking of how
+many places they had been in together, and of his own country, and
+how he wished he was there again.  Then the dead man's face moved.
+
+"Shamus turned and ran for his life, and he was running till he met
+some officers, and he told them that the Black Officer's body had
+stirred.  They thought he was lying, but they went off to the
+place, and one of them had the thought to take a flask of brandy in
+his pocket.  When they came to the lifeless body it stirred again,
+and with one thing and another they brought him round.
+
+"The Black Officer was not himself again for long, and they took
+him home to his own country, and he lay in bed in his house.  And
+every day a red deer would come to the house, and go into his room
+and sit on a chair beside the bed, speaking to him like a man.
+
+"Well, the Black Officer got better again, and went about among his
+friends; and once he was driving home from a dinner-party, and
+Shamus was with him.  It was just the last night of the hundred.
+And on the road they met a man, and Shamus knew him--for it was him
+they had seen by the fire on the march, as I told you at the
+beginning.  The Black Officer got down from his carriage and joined
+the man, and they walked a bit apart; but Shamus--he was so
+curious--whatever happened he must see them.  And he came within
+hearing just as they were parting, and he heard the stranger say,
+'This is the night.'
+
+"'No,' said the Black Officer, 'this night next year.'
+
+"So he came back, and they drove home.  A year went by, and the
+Black Officer was seeking through the country for the twelve best
+men he could find to accompany him to some deer-hunt or the like.
+And he asked Shamus, but he pretended he was ill--Oh, he was very
+unwell!--and he could not go, but stayed in bed at home.  So the
+Black Officer chose another man, and he and the twelve set out--the
+thirteen of them.  But they were never seen again."
+
+"Never seen again?  Were they lost in the snow?"
+
+"It did come on a heavy fall, sir."
+
+"But their bodies were found?"
+
+"No, sir--though they searched high and low; they are not found,
+indeed, till this day.  It was thought the Black Officer had sold
+himself and twelve other men, sir."
+
+"To the Devil?"
+
+"It would be that."
+
+For the narrator never mentions our ghostly foe, which produces a
+solemn effect.
+
+This story was absolutely new to me, and much I wished that Mr.
+Louis Stevenson could have heard it.  The blending of the far East
+with the Highlands reminds one of his "Master of Ballantrae," and
+what might he not make of that fairy red deer!  My boatman, too,
+told me what Mr. Stevenson says the Highlanders will not tell--the
+name of the man who committed the murder of which Alan Breck was
+accused.  But this secret I do not intend to divulge.
+
+The story of the Black Officer then seemed absolutely unpublished.
+But when Sir Walter Scott's diary was given to the world in
+October, 1890, it turned out that he was not wholly ignorant of the
+legend.  In 1828 he complains that he has been annoyed by a lady,
+because he had printed "in the 'Review'" a rawhead and bloody-bones
+story of her father, Major Macpherson, who was lost in a snowstorm.
+This Major Macpherson was clearly the Black Officer.  Mr. Douglas,
+the publisher of Scott's diary, discovered that the "Review"
+mentioned vaguely by Scott was the "Foreign Quarterly," No. I,
+July, 1827.  In an essay on Hoffmann's novels, Sir Walter
+introduced the tale as told to him in a letter from a nobleman some
+time deceased, not more distinguished for his love of science than
+his attachment to literature in all its branches.
+
+The tale is too long to be given completely.  Briefly, a Captain
+M., on St. Valentine's day, 1799, had been deer-shooting (at an odd
+time of the year) in the hills west of D-.  He did not return, a
+terrible snowstorm set in, and finally he and his friends were
+found dead in a bothy, which the tempest had literally destroyed.
+Large stones from the walls were found lying at distances of a
+hundred yards; the wooden uprights were twisted like broken sticks.
+The Captain was lying dead, without his clothes, on the bed; one
+man was discovered at a distance, another near the Captain.  Then
+it was remembered that, at the same bothy a month before, a
+shepherd lad had inquired for the Captain, had walked with him for
+some time, and that, on the officer's return, "a mysterious anxiety
+hung about him."  A fire had also been seen blazing on an opposite
+height, and when some of the gillies went to the spot, "there was
+no fire to be seen."  On the day when the expedition had started,
+the Captain was warned of the ill weather, but he said "he MUST
+go."  He was an unpopular man, and was accused of getting money by
+procuring recruits from the Highlands, often by cruel means.  "Our
+informer told us nothing more; he neither told us his own opinion,
+nor that of the country, but left it to our own notions of the
+manner in which good and evil is rewarded in this life to suggest
+the author of the miserable event.  He seemed impressed with
+superstitious awe on the subject, and said, 'There was na the like
+seen in a' Scotland.'  The man is far advanced in years and is a
+schoolmaster in the neighbourhood of Rannoch."
+
+Sir Walter says that "the feeling of superstitious awe annexed to
+the catastrophe could not have been improved by any circumstances
+of additional horror which a poet could have invented.  But is
+there not something more moving still in the boatman's version:
+"they were never seen again . . . they were not found indeed till
+this day"?
+
+The folklorist, of course, is eager to know whether the boatman's
+much more complete and connected narrative is a popular mythical
+development in the years between 1820 and 1890, or whether the
+schoolmaster of Rannoch did not tell all he knew.  It is unlikely,
+I think, that the siege of Seringapatam would have been remembered
+so long in connection with the Black Officer if it had not formed
+part of his original legend.  Meanwhile the earliest printed notice
+of the event with which I am acquainted, a notice only ten years
+later than the date of the Major's death in 1799, is given by Hogg
+in "The Spy," 1810-11, pp. 101-3.  I offer an abridgment of the
+narrative.
+
+"About the end of last century Major Macpherson and a party of
+friends went out to hunt on the Grampians between Athole and
+Badenoch.  They were highly successful, and in the afternoon they
+went into a little bothy, and, having meat and drink, they
+abandoned themselves to jollity.
+
+"During their merry-making a young man entered whose appearance
+particularly struck and somewhat shocked Macpherson; the stranger
+beckoned to the Major, and he followed him instantly out of the
+bothy.
+
+"When they parted, after apparently having had some earnest
+conversation, the stranger was out of sight long before the Major
+was half-way back, though only twenty yards away.
+
+"The Major showed on his return such evident marks of trepidation
+that the mirth was marred and no one cared to ask him questions.
+
+"This was early in the week, and on Friday the Major persuaded his
+friends to make a second expedition to the mountains, from which
+they never returned.
+
+"On a search being made their dead bodies were found in the bothy,
+some considerably mangled, but some were not marked by any wound.
+
+"It was visible that this had not been effected by human agency:
+the bothy was torn from its foundations and scarcely a vestige left
+of it, and one huge stone, which twelve men could not have raised,
+was tossed to a considerable distance.
+
+"On this event Scott's beautiful ballad of "Glenfinlas" is said to
+have been founded."
+
+As will be seen presently, Hogg was wrong about "Glenfinlas"; the
+boatman was acquainted with a traditional version of that wild
+legend.  I found another at Rannoch.
+
+The Highland fairies are very vampirish.  The Loch Awe boatman
+lives at a spot haunted by a shadowy maiden.  Her last appearance
+was about thirty years ago.  Two young men were thrashing corn one
+morning, when the joint of the flail broke.  The owner went to
+Larichban and entered an outhouse to look for a piece of sheepskin
+wherewith to mend the flail.  He was long absent, and his companion
+went after him.  He found him struggling in the arms of a ghostly
+maid, who had nearly murdered him, but departed on the arrival of
+his friend.  It is not easy to make out what these ghoulish women
+are--not fairies exactly, nor witches, nor vampires.  For example,
+three shepherds at a lonely sheiling were discoursing of their
+loves, and it was, "Oh, how happy I should be if Katie were here,
+or Maggie, or Bessie!" as the case might be.  So they would say and
+so they would wish, and lo! one evening, the three girls came to
+the door of the hut.  So they made them welcome; but one of the
+shepherds was playing the Jew's-harp, and he did not like the turn
+matters were taking.
+
+The two others stole off into corners of the darkling hut with
+their lovers, but this prudent lad never took his lips off the
+Jew's-harp.
+
+"Harping is good if no ill follows it," said the semblance of his
+sweetheart; but he never answered.  He played and thrummed, and out
+of one dark corner trickled red blood into the fire-light, and out
+of another corner came a current of blood to meet it.  Then he
+slowly rose, still harping, and backed his way to the door, and
+fled into the hills from these cruel airy shapes of false desire.
+
+"And do the people actually believe all that?"
+
+"Ay, do they!"
+
+That is the boatman's version of Scott's theme in "Glenfinlas."
+Witches played a great part in his narratives.
+
+In the boatman's country there is a plain, and on the plain is a
+knoll, about twice the height of a one-storeyed cottage, and
+pointed "like a sugar-loaf."  The old people remember, or have
+heard, that this mound was not there when they were young.  It
+swelled up suddenly out of the grave of a witch who was buried
+there.
+
+The witch was a great enemy of a shepherd.  Every morning she would
+put on the shape of a hare, and run before his dogs, and lead them
+away from the sheep.  He knew it was right to shoot at her with a
+crooked sixpence, and he hit her on the hind leg, and the dogs were
+after her, and chased the hare into the old woman's cottage.  The
+shepherd ran after them, and there he found them, tearing at the
+old woman; but the hare was twisted round their necks, and she was
+crying, "Tighten, hare, tighten!" and it was choking them.  So he
+tore the hare off the dogs; and then the old woman begged him to
+save her from them, and she promised never to plague him again.
+"But if the old dog's teeth had been as sharp as the young one's,
+she would have been a dead woman."
+
+When this witch died she knew she could never lie in safety in her
+grave; but there was a very safe churchyard in Aberdeenshire, a
+hundred and fifty miles away, and if she could get into that she
+would be at rest.  And she rose out of her grave, and off she went,
+and the Devil after her, on a black horse; but, praise to the
+swiftness of her feet, she won the churchyard before him.  Her
+first grave swelled up, oh, as high as that green hillock!
+
+Witches are still in active practice.  There was an old woman very
+miserly.  She would alway be taking one of her neighbours' sheep
+from the hills, and they stood it for long; they did not like to
+meddle with her.  At last it grew so bad that they brought her
+before the sheriff, and she got eighteen months in prison.  When
+she came out she was very angry, and set about making an image of
+the woman whose sheep she had taken.  When the image was made she
+burned it and put the ashes in a burn.  And it is a very curious
+thing, but the woman she made it on fell into a decline, and took
+to her bed.
+
+The witch and her family went to America.  They kept a little inn,
+in a country place, and people who slept in it did not come out
+again.  They were discovered, and the eldest son was hanged; he
+confessed that he had committed nineteen murders before he left
+Scotland.
+
+"They were not a nice family."
+
+"The father was a very respectable old man."
+
+The boatman gave me the name of this wicked household, but it is
+perhaps better forgotten.
+
+The extraordinary thing is that this appears to be the Highland
+introduction to, or part first of, a gloomy and sanguinary story of
+a murder hole--an inn of assassins in a lonely district of the
+United States, which Mr. Louis Stevenson heard in his travels
+there, and told to me some years ago.  The details have escaped my
+memory, but, as Mr. Stevenson narrated them, they rivalled De
+Quincey's awful story of Williams's murders in the Ratcliffe
+Highway.
+
+Life must still be haunted in Badenoch, as it was on Ida's hill, by
+forms of unearthly beauty, the goddess or the ghost yet wooing the
+shepherd; indeed, the boatman told me many stories of living
+superstition and terrors of the night; but why should I exhaust his
+wallet?  To be sure, it seemed very full of tales; these offered
+here may be but the legends which came first to his hand.  The
+boatman is not himself a believer in the fairy world, or not more
+than all sensible men ought to be.  The supernatural is too
+pleasant a thing for us to discard in an earnest, scientific manner
+like Mr. Kipling's Aurelian McGubben.  Perhaps I am more
+superstitious than the boatman, and the yarns I swopped with him
+about ghosts I have met would seem even more mendacious to
+possessors of pocket microscopes and of the modern spirit.  But I
+would rather have one banshee story than fifteen pages of proof
+that "life, which began as a cell, with a c, is to end as a sell,
+with an s."  It should be added that the boatman has given his
+consent to the printing of his yarns.  On being offered a moiety of
+the profits, he observed that he had no objection to these, but
+that he entirely declined to be responsible for any share of the
+expenses.  Would that all authors were as sagacious, for then the
+amateur novelist and the minor poet would vex us no more.
+
+Perhaps I should note that I have not made the boatman say
+"whateffer," because he doesn't.  The occasional use of the
+imperfect is almost his only Gaelic idiom.  It is a great comfort
+and pleasure, when the trout do not rise, to meet a skilled and
+unaffected narrator of the old beliefs, old legends, as ancient as
+the hills that girdle and guard the loch, or as antique, at least,
+as man's dwelling among the mountains--the Yellow Hill, the Calf
+Hill, the Hill of the Stack.  The beauty of the scene, the pleasant
+talk, the daffodils on the green isle among the Celtic graves,
+compensate for a certain "dourness" among the fishes of Loch Awe.
+On the occasions when they are not dour they rise very pleasant and
+free, but, in these brief moments, it is not of legends and
+folklore that you are thinking, but of the landing-net.  The
+boatman, by the way, was either not well acquainted with Marchen--
+Celtic nursery-tales such as Campbell of Islay collected, or was
+not much interested in them, or, perhaps, had the shyness about
+narrating this particular sort of old wives' fables which is so
+common.  People who do know them seldom tell them in Sassenach.
+
+
+
+LOCH-FISHING
+
+
+
+LITTLE LOCH BEG
+
+There is something mysterious in loch-fishing, in the tastes and
+habits of the fish which inhabit the innumerable lakes and tarns of
+Scotland.  It is not always easy to account either for their
+presence or their absence, for their numbers or scarcity, their
+eagerness to take or their "dourness."  For example, there is Loch
+Borlan, close to the well-known little inn of Alt-na-geal-gach in
+Sutherland.  Unless that piece of water is greatly changed, it is
+simply full of fish of about a quarter of a pound, which will rise
+at almost any time to almost any fly.  There is not much pleasure
+in catching such tiny and eager trout, but in the season complacent
+anglers capture and boast of their many dozens.  On the other hand,
+a year or two ago, a beginner took a four-pound trout there with
+the fly.  If such trout exist in Borlan, it is hard to explain the
+presence of the innumerable fry.  One would expect the giants of
+the deep to keep down their population.  Not far off is another
+small lake, Loch Awe, which has invisible advantages over Loch
+Borlan, yet there the trout are, or were, "fat and fair of flesh,"
+like Tamlane in the ballad.  Wherefore are the trout in Loch
+Tummell so big and strong, from one to five pounds, and so scarce,
+while those in Loch Awe are numerous and small?  One occasionally
+sees examples of how quickly trout will increase in weight, and
+what curious habits they will adopt.  In a county of south-western
+Scotland there is a large village, populated by a keenly devoted
+set of anglers, who miss no opportunity.  Within a quarter of a
+mile of the village is a small tarn, very picturesquely situated
+among low hills, and provided with the very tiniest feeder and
+outflow.  There is a sluice at the outflow, and, for some reason,
+the farmer used to let most of the water out, in the summer of
+every year.  In winter the tarn is used by the curling club.  It is
+not deep, has rather a marshy bottom, and many ducks, snipe, and
+wild-fowl generally dwell among the reeds and marish plants of its
+sides.  Nobody ever dreamed of fishing here, but one day a rustic,
+"glowering" idly over the wall of the adjacent road, saw fish
+rising.  He mentioned his discovery to an angler, who is said to
+have caught some large trout, but tradition varies about
+everything, except that the fish are very "dour."  One evening in
+August, a warm, still evening, I happened to visit the tarn.  As
+soon as the sun fell below the hills, it was literally alive with
+large trout rising.  As far as one could estimate from the brief
+view of heads and shoulders, they were sometimes two or three
+pounds in weight.  I got my rod, of course, as did a rural friend.
+Mine was a small cane rod, his a salmon-rod.  I fished with one
+Test-fly; he with three large loch-flies.  The fish were rising
+actually at our feet, but they seemed to move about very much,
+never, or seldom, rising twice exactly at the same place.  The
+hypothesis was started that there were but few of them, and that
+they ran round and round, like a stage army, to give an appearance
+of multitude.  But this appears improbable.  What is certain was
+our utter inability ever to get a rise from the provoking
+creatures.  The dry fly is difficult to use on a loch, as there is
+no stream to move it, and however gently you draw it it makes a
+"wake"--a trail behind it.  Wet or dry, or "twixt wet and dry,"
+like the convivial person in the song, we could none of us raise
+them.  I did catch a small but beautifully proportioned and pink-
+fleshed trout with the alder, but everything else, silver sedge and
+all, everything from midge to May-fly, in the late twilight, was
+offered to them in vain.  In windy or cloudy weather it was just as
+useless; indeed, I never saw them rise, except in a warm summer
+stillness, at and after sunset.  Probably they would have taken a
+small red worm, pitched into the ripple of a rise; but we did not
+try that.  After a few evenings, they seemed to give up rising
+altogether.  I don't feel certain that they had not been netted:
+yet no trout seemed to be on sale in the village.  Their presence
+in the water may perhaps be accounted for thus:  they may have come
+into the loch from the river, by way of the tiny feeder; but the
+river-trout are both scarce and small.  A new farmer had given up
+letting the water off, and probably there must have been very rich
+feeding, water-shrimps or snails, which might partly account for
+the refusal to rise at the artificial fly.  Or they may have been
+ottered by the villagers, though that would rather have made them
+rise short than not rise at all.
+
+There is another loch on an extremely remote hillside, eight miles
+from the smallest town, in a pastoral country.  There are trout
+enough in the loch, and of excellent size and flavour, but you
+scarcely ever get them.  They rise freely, but they ALWAYS rise
+short.  It is, I think, the most provoking loch I ever fished.  You
+raise them; they come up freely, showing broad sides of a ruddy
+gold, like the handsomest Test trout, but they almost invariably
+miss the hook.  You do not land one out of twenty.  The reason is,
+apparently, that people from the nearest town use the otter in the
+summer evenings, when these trout rise best.  In a Sutherland loch,
+Mr. Edward Moss tells us (in "A Season in Sutherland"), that he
+once found an elegant otter, a well-made engine of some
+unscrupulous tourist, lying in the bottom of the water on a sunny
+day.  At Loch Skene, on the top of a hill, twenty miles from any
+town, otters are occasionally found by the keeper or the shepherds,
+concealed near the shore.  The practice of ottering can give little
+pleasure to any but a depraved mind, and nothing educates trout so
+rapidly into "rising short"; why they are not to be had when they
+are rising most vehemently, "to themselves," is another mystery.  A
+few rises are encouraging, but when the water is all splashing with
+rises, as a rule the angler is only tantalised.  A windy day, a day
+with a large ripple, but without white waves breaking, is, as a
+rule, best for a loch.  In some lochs the sea-trout prefer such a
+hurricane that a boat can hardly be kept on the water.  I have
+known a strong north wind in autumn put down the sea-trout, whereas
+the salmon rose, with unusual eagerness, just in the shallows where
+the waves broke in foam on the shore.  The best day I ever had with
+sea-trout was muggy and grey, and the fish were most eager when the
+water was still, except for a tremendously heavy shower of rain, "a
+singing shower," as George Chapman has it.  On that day two rods
+caught thirty-nine sea-trout, weighing forty pounds.  But it is
+difficult to say beforehand what day will do well, except that
+sunshine is bad, a north wind worse, and no wind at all usually
+means an empty basket.  Even to this rule there are exceptions, and
+one of these is in the case of a tarn which I shall call,
+pleonastically, Little Loch Beg.
+
+This is not the real name of the loch--quite enough people know its
+real name already.  Nor does it seem necessary to mention the
+district where the loch lies hidden; suffice it to say that a land
+of more streams and scarcer trout you will hardly find.  We had
+tried all the rivers and burns to no purpose, and the lochs are
+capricious and overfished.  One loch we had not tried, Loch Beg.
+You walk, or drive, a few miles from any village, then you climb a
+few hundred yards of hill, and from the ridge you see, on one hand
+a great amphitheatre of green and purple mountain-sides, in the
+west; on the east, within a hundred yards under a slope, is Loch
+Beg.  It is not a mile in circumference, and all but some eighty
+yards of shore is defended against the angler by wide beds of
+water-lilies, with their pretty white floating lamps, or by tall
+sedges and reeds.  Nor is the wading easy.  Four steps you make
+with safety, at the fifth your foremost leg sinks in mud apparently
+bottomless.  Most people fish only the eastern side, whereof a few
+score yards are open, with a rocky and gravelly bottom.
+
+Now, all lochs have their humours.  In some trout like a big fly,
+in some a small one, but almost all do best with a rough wind or
+rain.  I knew enough of Loch Beg to approach it at noon on a
+blazing day of sunshine, when the surface was like glass.  It was
+like that when first I saw it, and a shepherd warned us that we
+"would dae naething"; we did little, indeed, but I rose nearly
+every rising fish I cast over, losing them all, too, and in some
+cases being broken, as I was using very fine gut, and the fish were
+heavy.  Another trial seemed desirable, and the number of rising
+trout was most tempting.  All over it trout were rising to the
+natural fly, with big circles like those you see in the Test at
+twilight; while in the centre, where no artificial fly can be cast
+for want of a boat, a big fish would throw himself out of the water
+in his eagerness.  One such I saw which could not have weighed
+under three pounds, a short, thick, dark-yellow fish.
+
+I was using a light two-handed rod, and fancied that a single Test-
+fly on very fine tackle would be the best lure.  It certainly rose
+the trout, if one threw into the circle they made; but they never
+were hooked.  One fish of about a pound and a half threw himself
+out of the water at it, hit it, and broke the fine tackle.  So I
+went on raising them, but never getting them.  As long as the sun
+blazed and no breeze ruffled the water, they rose bravely, but a
+cloud or even a ripple seemed to send them down.
+
+At last I tried a big alder, and with that I actually touched a
+few, and even landed several on the shelving bank.  Their average
+weight, as we proved on several occasions, was exactly three-
+quarters of a pound; but we never succeeded in landing any of the
+really big ones.
+
+A local angler told me he had caught one of two pounds, and lost
+another "like a young grilse," after he had drawn it on to the
+bank.  I can easily believe it, for in no loch, but one, have I
+ever seen so many really big and handsome fish feeding.  Loch Beg
+is within a mile of a larger and famous loch, but it is infinitely
+better, though the other looks much more favourable in all ways for
+sport.  The only place where fishing is easy, as I have said, is a
+mere strip of coast under the hill, where there is some gravel, and
+the mouth of a very tiny feeder, usually dry.  Off this place the
+trout rose freely, but not near so freely as in a certain corner,
+quite out of reach without a boat, where the leviathans lived and
+sported.
+
+After the little expanse of open shore had been fished over a few
+times, the trout there seemed to grow more shy, and there was a
+certain monotony in walking this tiny quarter-deck of space.  So I
+went round to the west side, where the water-lilies are.  Fish were
+rising about three yards beyond the weedy beds, and I foolishly
+thought I would try for them.  Now, you cannot overestimate the
+difficulty of casting a fly across yards of water-lilies.  You
+catch in the weeds as you lift your line for a fresh cast, and then
+you have to extricate it laboriously, shortening line, and then to
+let it out again, and probably come to grief once more.
+
+I saw a trout rise, with a huge sullen circle dimpling round him,
+cast over him, raised him, and missed him.  The water was perfectly
+still, and the "plop" made by these fish was very exciting and
+tantalising.  The next that rose took the alder, and, of course,
+ran right into the broad band of lilies.  I tried all the dodges I
+could think of, and all that Mr. Halford suggests.  I dragged at
+him hard.  I gave him line.  I sat down and endeavoured to
+disengage my thoughts, but I never got a glimpse of him, and
+finally had to wade as far in as I dared, and save as much of the
+casting line as I could; it was very little.
+
+There was one thing to be said for the trout on this side:  they
+meant business.  They did not rise shyly, like the others, but went
+for the fly if it came at all near them, and then, down they
+rushed, and bolted into the lily-roots.
+
+A new plan occurred to me.  I put on about eighteen inches of the
+stoutest gut I had, to the end I knotted the biggest sea-trout fly
+I possessed, and, hooking the next fish that rose, I turned my back
+on the loch and ran uphill with the rod.  Looking back I saw a
+trout well over a pound flying across the lilies; but alas! the
+hold was not strong enough, and he fell back.  Again and again I
+tried this method, invariably hooking the trout, though the heavy
+short casting-line and the big fly fell very awkwardly in the dead
+stillness of the water.  I had some exciting runs with them, for
+they came eagerly to the big fly, and did not miss it, as they had
+missed the Red Quill, or Whitchurch Dun, with which at first I
+tried to beguile them.  One, of only the average weight, I did drag
+out over the lilies; the others fell off in mid-journey, but they
+never broke the uncompromising stout tackle.
+
+With the first chill of evening they ceased rising, and I left
+them, not ungrateful for their very peculiar manners and customs.
+The chances are that the trout beyond the band of weeds never see
+an artificial fly, and they are, therefore, the more guileless--at
+least, late in the season.  In spring, I believe, the lilies are
+less in the way, and I fear some one has put a Berthon boat on the
+loch in April.  But it is not so much what one catches in Loch Beg,
+as the monsters which one might catch that make the tarn so
+desirable.
+
+The loch seems to prove that any hill-tarn might be made a good
+place for sport, if trout were introduced where they do not exist
+already.  But the size of these in Loch Beg puzzles me, nor can one
+see how they breed, as breed they do:  for twice or thrice I caught
+a fingerling, and threw him in again.  No burn runs out of the
+loch, and, even in a flood, the feeder is so small, and its course
+so extremely steep, that one cannot imagine where the fish manage
+to spawn.  The only loch known to me where the common trout are of
+equal size, is on the Border.  It is extremely deep, with very
+clear water, and with scarce any spawning ground.  On a summer
+evening the trout are occasionally caught; three weighing seven
+pounds were taken one night, a year or two ago.  I have not tried
+the evening fishing, but at all other times of day have found them
+the "dourest" of trout, and they grow dourer.  But one is always
+lured on by the spectacle of the monsters which throw themselves
+out of water, with a splash that echoes through all the circuit of
+the low green hills.  They probably reach at least four or five
+pounds, but it is unlikely that the biggest take the fly, and one
+may doubt whether they propagate their species, as small trout are
+never seen there.
+
+There are two ways of enlarging the size of trout which should be
+carefully avoided.  Pike are supposed to keep down the population
+and leave more food for the survivors, minnows are supposed to be
+nourishing food.  Both of these novelties are dangerous.  Pike have
+been introduced in that long lovely sheet of water, Loch Ken, and I
+have never once seen the rise of a trout break that surface, so
+"hideously serene."  Trout, in lochs which have become accustomed
+to feeding on minnows, are apt to disdain fly altogether.  Of
+course there are lochs in which good trout coexist with minnows and
+with pike, but these inmates are too dangerous to be introduced.
+The introduction, too, of Loch Leven trout is often disappointing.
+Sometimes they escape down the burn into the river in floods;
+sometimes, perhaps for lack of proper food and sufficient, they
+dwindle terribly in size, and become no better than "brownies."  In
+St. Mary's Loch, in Selkirkshire, some Canadian trout were
+introduced.  Little or nothing has been seen of them, unless some
+small creatures of a quarter of a pound, extraordinarily silvery,
+and more often in the air than in the water when hooked, are these
+children of the remote West.  If they grew up, and retained their
+beauty and sprightliness, they would be excellent substitutes for
+sea-trout.  Almost all experiments in stocking lochs have their
+perils, except the simple experiment of putting trout where there
+were no trout before.  This can do no harm, and they may increase
+in weight, let us hope not in wisdom, like the curiously heavy and
+shy fish mentioned in the beginning of this paper.
+
+
+
+LOCH LEVEN
+
+
+
+I had a friend once, an angler, who in winter was fond of another
+sport.  He liked to cast his louis into the green baize pond at
+Monte Carlo, and, on the whole, he was generally "broken."  He
+seldom landed the golden fish of the old man's dream in Theocritus.
+When the croupier had gaffed all his money he would repent and say,
+"Now, that would have kept me at Loch Leven for a fortnight."  One
+used to wonder whether a fortnight of Loch Leven was worth an
+afternoon of the pleasure of losing at Monte Carlo.  The loch has a
+name for being cockneyfied, beset by whole fleets of competitive
+anglers from various angling clubs in Scotland.  That men should
+competitively angle shows, indeed, a great want of true angling
+sentiment.  To fish in a crowd is odious, to work hard for prizes
+of flasks and creels and fly-books is to mistake the true meaning
+of the pastime.  However, in this crowded age men are so
+constituted that they like to turn a contemplative exercise into a
+kind of Bank Holiday.  There is no use in arguing with such
+persons; the worst of their pleasure is that it tends to change a
+Scotch loch into something like the pond of the Welsh Harp, at
+Hendon.  It is always good news to read in the papers how the
+Dundee Walton Society had a bad day, and how the first prize was
+won by Mr. Macneesh, with five trout weighing three pounds and
+three quarters.  Loch Leven, then, is crowded and cockneyfied by
+competitions; it has also no great name for beauty of landscape.
+Every one to his own taste in natural beauty, but in this respect I
+think Loch Leven is better than its reputation.  It is certainly
+more pictorial, so to speak, than some remote moor lochs up near
+Cape Wrath; Forsinard in particular, where the scenery looks like
+one gigantic series of brown "baps," flat Scotch scones, all of low
+elevation, all precisely similar to each other.
+
+Loch Leven is not such a cockney place as the majority of men who
+have not visited it imagine.  It really is larger than the Welsh
+Harp at Hendon, and the scenery, though not like that of Ben
+Cruachan or Ben Mohr, excels the landscape of Middlesex.  At the
+northern end is a small town, grey, with some red roofs and one or
+two characteristic Fifeshire church-towers, squat and strong.
+There are also a few factory chimneys, which are not fair to
+outward view, nor appropriate by a loch-side.  On the west are
+ranges of distant hills, low but not uncomely.  On the east rises a
+beautiful moorland steep with broken and graceful outlines.  When
+the sun shines on the red tilled land, in spring; when the smoke of
+burning gorse coils up all day long into the sky, as if the Great
+Spirit were taking his pipe of peace on the mountains; when the
+islands are mirrored on the glassy water, then the artist rejoices,
+though the angler knows that he will waste his day.  As far as
+fishing goes, he is bound to be "clean," as the boatmen say--to
+catch nothing; but the solemn peace, and the walls and ruined
+towers of Queen Mary's prison, may partially console the fisher.
+The accommodation is agreeable, there is a pleasant inn--an old
+town-house, perhaps, of some great family, when the great families
+did not rush up to London, but spent their winters in such country
+towns as Dumfries and St. Andrews.  The inn has a great green
+garden at its doors, and if the talk is mainly of fishing, and if
+every one tells of his monster trout that escaped the net, there is
+much worse conversation than that.
+
+When you reach Kinross, and, after excellent ham and eggs, begin to
+make a start, the cockney element is most visible at the first.
+Everybody's name is registered in a book; each pays a considerable,
+but not exorbitant, fee for the society--often well worth the
+money--and the assistance of boatmen.  These gentlemen are also
+well provided with luncheon and beer, and, on the whole, there is
+more pleasure in the life of a Loch Leven boatman than in most
+arts, crafts, or professions.  He takes the rod when his patron is
+lazy; it is said that he often catches the trout; {1} he sees a
+good deal of good company, and, if his basket be heavy, who so
+content as he?  The first thing is to row out to a good bay, and
+which will prove a good bay depends on the strength and direction
+of the wind.  Perhaps the best fishing is farthest off, at the end
+of a long row, but the best scenery is not so distant.  A good deal
+hangs on an early start when there are many boats out.
+
+Loch Leven is a rather shallow loch, seldom much over fifteen feet
+deep, save where a long narrow rent or geological flaw runs through
+the bottom.  The water is of a queer glaucous green, olive-
+coloured, or rather like the tint made when you wash out a box of
+water-colour paints.  This is not so pretty as the black wave of
+Loch Awe or Loch Shin, but has a redeeming quality in the richness
+of the feeding for trout.  These are fabled to average about a
+pound, but are probably a trifle under that weight, on the whole.
+They are famous, and, according to Sir Walter Scott, were famous as
+long ago as in Queen Mary's time, for the bright silver of their
+sides, for their pink flesh, and gameness when hooked.  Theorists
+have explained all this by saying that they are the descendants of
+land-locked salmon.  The flies used on the loch are smaller than
+those favoured in the Highlands; they are sold attached to casts,
+and four flies are actually employed at once.  Probably two are
+quite enough at a time.  If a veteran trout is attracted by seeing
+four flies, all of different species, and these like nothing in
+nature, all conspiring to descend on him at once, he must be less
+cautious than we generally find him.  The Hampshire angler, of
+course, will sneer at the whole proceeding, the "chucking and
+chancing it," in the queer-coloured wave, and the use of so many
+fanciful entomological specimens.  But the Hampshire angler is very
+welcome to try his arts, in a calm, and his natural-looking cocked-
+up flies.  He will probably be defeated by a grocer from Greenock,
+sinking his four flies very deep, as is, by some experts,
+recommended.  The trout are capricious, perhaps as capricious as
+any known to the angler, but they are believed to prefer a strong
+east wind and a dark day.  The east wind is nowhere, perhaps, so
+bad as people fancy; it is certainly not so bad as the north wind,
+and on Loch Leven it is the favourite.  The man who is lucky enough
+to hit on the right day, and to land a couple of dozen Loch Leven
+trout, has very good reason to congratulate himself, and need envy
+nobody.  But such days and such takes are rare, and the summer of
+1890 was much more unfortunate than that of 1889.
+
+One great mistake is made by the company which farms the Loch,
+stocks it, supplies the boats, and regulates the fishing.  They
+permit trolling with angels, or phantoms, or the natural minnow.
+Now, trolling may be comparatively legitimate, when the boat is
+being pulled against the wind to its drift, but there is no more
+skill in it than in sitting in an omnibus.  But for trolling, many
+a boat would come home "clean" in the evening, on days of calm, or
+when, for other reasons of their own, the trout refuse to take the
+artificial fly.  Yet there are men at Loch Leven who troll all day,
+and poor sport it must be, as a trout of a pound or so has no
+chance on a trolling-rod.  This method is inimical to fly-fishing,
+but is such a consolation to the inefficient angler that one can
+hardly expect to see it abolished.  The unsuccessful clamour for
+trolling, instead of consoling themselves, as sportsmen should do,
+with the conversation of the gillies, their anecdotes of great
+trout, and their reminiscences of great anglers, especially of the
+late Mr. Russell, the famed editor of the "Scotsman."  This
+humourist is gradually "winning his way to the mythical."  All
+fishing stories are attached to him; his eloquence is said (in the
+language of the historian of the Buccaneers) to have been "florid";
+he is reported to have thrown his fly-book into Loch Leven on an
+unlucky day, saying, "You brutes, take your choice," and a rock,
+which he once hooked and held on to, is named after him, on the
+Tweed.  In addition to the humane and varied conversation of the
+boatmen, there is always the pure pleasure of simply gazing at the
+hillsides and at the islands.  They are as much associated with the
+memory of Mary Stuart as Hermitage or even Holyrood.  On that
+island was her prison; here the rude Morton tried to bully her into
+signing away her rights; hence she may often have watched the shore
+at night for the lighting of a beacon, a sign that a rescue was at
+hand.
+
+The hills, at least, are much as she may have seen them, and the
+square towers and crumbling walls on the island met her eyes when
+they were all too strong.  The "quay" is no longer "rude," as when
+"The Abbot" was written, and is crowded with the green boats of the
+Loch Leven Company.  But you still land on her island under "the
+huge old tree" which Scott saw, which the unhappy Mary may herself
+have seen.  The small garden and the statues are gone, the garden
+whence Roland Graeme led Mary to the boat and to brief liberty and
+hope unfulfilled.  Only a kind of ground-plan remains of the halls
+where Lindesay and Ruthven browbeat her forlorn Majesty.  But you
+may climb the staircase where Roland Graeme stood sentinel, and
+feel a touch, of what Pepys felt when he kissed a dead Queen--
+Katherine of Valois.  Like Roland Graeme, the Queen may have been
+"wearied to death of this Castle of Loch Leven," where, in spring,
+all seems so beautiful, the trees budding freshly above the yellow
+celandine and among the grey prison walls.  It was a kindlier
+prison house than Fotheringay, and minds peaceful and contented
+would gladly have taken "this for a hermitage."
+
+The Roman Emperors used to banish too powerful subjects to the
+lovely isles that lie like lilies on the AEgean.  Plutarch tried to
+console these exiles, by showing them how fortunate they were, far
+from the bustle of the Forum, the vices, the tortures, the noise
+and smoke of Rome, happy, if they chose, in their gardens, with the
+blue waters breaking on the rocks, and, as he is careful to add,
+WITH PLENTY OF FISHING.  Mr. Mahaffy calls this "rhetorical
+consolation," and the exiles may have been of his mind.  But the
+exiles would have been wise to listen to Plutarch, and, had I
+enjoyed the luck of Mary Stuart, when Loch Leven was not
+overfished, when the trout were uneducated, never would I have
+plunged into politics again.  She might have been very happy, with
+Ronsard's latest poems, with Italian romances, with a boat on the
+loch, and some Rizzio to sing to her on the still summer days.
+From her Castle she would hear how the politicians were squabbling,
+lying, raising a man to divinity and stoning him next day, cutting
+each other's heads off, swearing and forswearing themselves,
+conspiring and caballing.  Suave mari, and the peace of Loch Leven
+and the island hermitage would have been the sweeter for the din
+outside.  A woman, a Queen, a Stuart, could not attain, and perhaps
+ought not to have attained, this epicureanism.  Mary Stuart had her
+chance, and missed it; perhaps, after all, her shrewish female
+gaoler made the passionless life impossible.
+
+These, at Loch Leven, are natural reflections.  The place has a
+charm of its own, especially if you make up your mind not to be
+disappointed, not to troll, and not to envy the more fortunate
+anglers who shout to you the number of their victories across the
+wave.  Even at Loch Leven we may be contemplative, may be quiet,
+and go a-fishing. {2}
+
+
+
+THE BLOODY DOCTOR
+
+
+
+(A BAD DAY ON CLEARBURN)
+
+Thou askest me, my brother, how first and where I met the Bloody
+Doctor?  The tale is weird, so weird that to a soul less proved
+than thine I scarce dare speak of the adventure.
+
+
+This, perhaps, would be the right way of beginning a story (not
+that it is a story exactly), with the title forced on me by the
+name and nature of the hero.  But I do not think I could keep up
+the style without a lady-collaborator; besides, I have used the
+term "weird" twice already, and thus played away the trumps of
+modern picturesque diction.  To return to our Doctor:  many a bad
+day have I had on Clearburn Loch, and never a good one.  But one
+thing draws me always to the loch when I have the luck to be within
+twenty miles of it.  There are trout in Clearburn!  The Border
+angler knows that the trout in his native waters is nearly as
+extinct as the dodo.  Many causes have combined to extirpate the
+shy and spirited fish.  First, there are too many anglers:
+
+
+Twixt Holy Lee and Clovenfords,
+A tentier bit ye canna hae,
+
+
+sang that good old angler, now with God, Mr. Thomas Tod Stoddart.
+But between Holy Lee and Clovenfords you may see half a dozen rods
+on every pool and stream.  There goes that leviathan, the angler
+from London, who has been beguiled hither by the artless "Guide" of
+Mr. Watson Lyall.  There fishes the farmer's lad, and the
+schoolmaster, and the wandering weaver out of work or disinclined
+to work.  In his rags, with his thin face and red "goatee" beard,
+with his hazel wand and his home-made reel, there is withal
+something kindly about this poor fellow, this true sportsman.  He
+loves better to hear the lark sing than the mouse cheep; he wanders
+from depopulated stream to depopulated burn, and all is fish that
+comes to his fly.  Fingerlings he keeps, and does not return to the
+water "as pitying their youth."  Let us not grudge him his sport as
+long as he fishes fair, and he is always good company.  But he,
+with all the other countless fishermen, make fish so rare and so
+wary that, except after a flood in Meggat or the Douglas burn,
+trout are scarce to be taken by ordinary skill.  As for
+
+
+Thae reiving cheils
+Frae Galashiels,
+
+
+who use nets, and salmon roe, and poisons, and dynamite, they are
+miscreants indeed; they spoil the sport, not of the rich, but of
+their own class, and of every man who would be quiet, and go
+angling in the sacred streams of Christopher North and the
+Shepherd.  The mills, with their dyes and dirt, are also
+responsible for the dearth of trout.
+
+
+Untainted yet thy stream, fair Teviot, runs,
+
+
+Leyden sang; but now the stream is very much tainted indeed below
+Hawick, like Tweed in too many places.  Thus, for a dozen reasons,
+trout are nigh as rare as red deer.  Clearburn alone remains full
+of unsophisticated fishes, and I have the less hesitation in
+revealing this, because I do not expect the wanderer who may read
+this page to be at all more successful than myself.  No doubt they
+are sometimes to be had, by the basketful, but not often, nor by
+him who thinks twice before risking his life by smothering in a
+peaty bottom.
+
+To reach Clearburn Loch, if you start from the Teviot, you must
+pass through much of Scott's country and most of Leyden's.  I am
+credibly informed that persons of culture have forgotten John
+Leyden.  He was a linguist and a poet, and the friend of Walter
+Scott, and knew
+
+
+The mind whose fearless frankness naught could move,
+The friendship, like an elder brother's love.
+
+
+We remember what distant and what deadly shore has Leyden's cold
+remains, and people who do not know may not care to be reminded.
+
+Leaving Teviot, with Leyden for a guide, you walk, or drive,
+
+
+Where Bortha hoarse, that loads the meads with sand,
+Rolls her red tide.
+
+
+Not that it was red when we passed, but electro purior.
+
+
+Through slaty hills whose sides are shagged with thorn,
+Where springs, in scattered tufts, the dark green corn,
+Towers wood-girt Harden far above the vale.
+
+
+And very dark green, almost blue, was the corn in September, 1888.
+Upwards, always upwards, goes the road till you reach the crest,
+and watch far below the wide champaign, like a sea, broken by the
+shapes of hills, Windburg and Eildon, and Priesthaughswire, and
+"the rough skirts of stormy Ruberslaw," and Penchrise, and the twin
+Maidens, shaped like the breasts of Helen.  It is an old land, of
+war, of Otterburn, and Ancrum, and the Raid of the Fair Dodhead;
+but the plough has passed over all but the upper pastoral
+solitudes.  Turning again to the downward slope you see the loch of
+Alemoor, small and sullen, with Alewater feeding it.  Nobody knows
+much about the trout in it.  "It is reckoned the residence of the
+water-cow," a monster like the Australian bunyip.  There was a
+water-cow in Scott's loch of Cauldshiels, above Abbotsford.  The
+water-cow has not lately emerged from Alemoor to attack the casual
+angler.  You climb again by gentle slopes till you reach a most
+desolate table-land.  Far beyond it is the round top of Whitecombe,
+which again looks down on St. Mary's Loch, and up the Moffat, and
+across the Meggat Water; but none of these are within the view.
+Round are pastorum loca vasta, lands of Buccleugh and Bellenden,
+Deloraine, Sinton, Headshaw, and Glack.  Deloraine, by the way, is
+pronounced "Delorran," and perhaps is named from Orran, the Celtic
+saint.  On the right lies, not far from the road, a grey sheet of
+water, and this is Clearburn, where first I met the Doctor.
+
+The loch, to be plain, is almost unfishable.  It is nearly round,
+and everywhere, except in a small segment on the eastern side, is
+begirt with reeds of great height.  These reeds, again, grow in a
+peculiarly uncomfortable, quaggy bottom, which rises and falls, or
+rather which jumps and sinks when you step on it, like the seat of
+a very luxurious arm-chair.  Moreover, the bottom is pierced with
+many springs, wherein if you set foot you shall have thrown your
+last cast.
+
+By watching the loch when it is frozen, a man might come to learn
+something of the springs; but, even so, it is hard to keep clear of
+them in summer.  Now the wind almost always blows from the west,
+dead against the little piece of gravelly shore at the eastern
+side, so that casting against it is hard work and unprofitable.  On
+this day, by a rare chance, the wind blew from the east, though the
+sky at first was a brilliant blue, and the sun hot and fierce.  I
+walked round to the east side, waded in, and caught two or three
+small fellows.  It was slow work, when suddenly there began the
+greatest rise of trout I ever saw in my life.  From the edge of the
+loch as far as one could clearly see across it there was that
+endless plashing murmur, of all sounds in this world the sweetest
+to the ear.  Within the view of the eye, on each cast, there were a
+dozen trout rising all about, never leaping, but seriously and
+solemnly feeding.  Now is my chance at last, I fancied; but it was
+not so--far from it.  I might throw over the very noses of the
+beasts, but they seldom even glanced at the (artificial) fly.  I
+tried them with Greenwell's Glory, with a March brown, with "the
+woodcock wing and hare-lug," but it was almost to no purpose.  If
+one did raise a fish, he meant not business--all but "a casual
+brute," which broke the already weakened part of a small "glued-up"
+cane rod.  I had to twist a piece of paper round the broken end,
+wet it, and push it into the joint, where it hung on somehow, but
+was not pleasant to cast with.  From twelve to half-past one the
+gorging went merrily forward, and I saw what the fish were rising
+at.  The whole surface of the loch, at least on the east side, was
+absolutely peppered with large, hideous insects.  They had big
+grey-white wings, bodies black as night, and brilliant crimson
+legs, or feelers, or whatever naturalists call them.  The trout
+seemed as if they could not have too much of these abominable
+wretches, and the flies were blown across the loch, not singly, but
+in populous groups.  I had never seen anything like them in any
+hook-book, nor could I deceive the trout by the primitive dodge of
+tying a red thread round the shank of a dark fly.  So I waded out,
+and fell to munching a frugal sandwich and watching Nature, not
+without a cigarette.
+
+Now Nature is all very well.  I have nothing to say against her of
+a Sunday, or when trout are not rising.  But she was no comfort to
+me now.  Smiling she gazed on my discomfiture.  The lovely lines of
+the hills, curving about the loch, and with their deepest dip just
+opposite where I sat, were all of a golden autumn brown, except in
+the violet distance.  The grass of Parnassus grew thick and white
+around me, with its moonlight tint of green in the veins.  On a
+hillside by a brook the countryfolk were winning their hay, and
+their voices reached me softly from far off.  On the loch the
+marsh-fowl flashed and dipped, the wild ducks played and dived and
+rose; first circling high and higher, then, marshalled in the shape
+of a V, they made for Alemoor.  A solitary heron came quite near
+me, and tried his chance with the fish, but I think he had no luck.
+All this is pleasant to remember, and I made rude sketches in the
+fly-leaves of a copy of Hogg's poems, where I kept my flies.  But
+what joy was there in this while the "take" grew fainter and ceased
+at least near the shore?  Out in the middle, where few flies
+managed to float, the trout were at it till dark.  But near shore
+there was just one trout who never stopped gorging all day.  He
+lived exactly opposite the nick in the distant hills, and exactly a
+yard farther out than I could throw a fly.  He was a big one, and I
+am inclined to think that he was the Devil.  For, if I had stepped
+in deeper, and the water had come over my wading boots, the odds
+are that my frail days on earth would have been ended by a chill,
+and I knew this, and yet that fish went on tempting me to my ruin.
+I suppose I tried to reach him a dozen times, and cast a hundred,
+but it was to no avail.  At length, as the afternoon grew grey and
+chill, I pitched a rock at him, by way of showing that I saw
+through his fiendish guile, and I walked away.
+
+There was no rise now, and the lake was leaden and gloomy.  When I
+reached the edge of the deep reeds I tried, once or twice, to wade
+through them within casting distance of the water, but was always
+driven off by the traitorous quagginess of the soil.  At last,
+taking my courage in both hands, I actually got so near that I
+could throw a fly over the top of the tall reeds, and then came a
+heavy splash, and the wretched little broken rod nearly doubled up.
+"Hooray, here I am among the big ones!" I said, and held on.  It
+was now that I learned the nature of Nero's diversion when he was
+an angler in the Lake of Darkness.  The loch really did deserve the
+term "grim"; the water here was black, the sky was ashen, the long
+green reeds closed cold about me, and beyond them there was trout
+that I could not deal with.  For when he tired of running, which
+was soon, he was as far away as ever.  Draw him through the forest
+of reeds I could not.  At last I did the fatal thing.  I took hold
+of the line, and then, "plop," as the poet said.  He was off.  A
+young sportsman on the bank who had joined me expressed his artless
+disappointment.  I cast over the confounded reeds once more.
+"Splash!"--the old story!  I stuck to the fish, and got him into
+the watery wood, and then he went where the lost trout go.  No more
+came on, so I floundered a yard or two farther, and climbed into a
+wild-fowl's nest, a kind of platform of matted reeds, all yellow
+and faded.  The nest immediately sank down deep into the water, but
+it stopped somewhere, and I made a cast.  The black water boiled,
+and the trout went straight down and sulked.  I merely held on,
+till at last it seemed "time for us to go," and by cautious tugging
+I got him through the reedy jungle, and "gruppit him," as the
+Shepherd would have said.  He was simply but decently wrapped
+round, from snout to tail, in very fine water-weeds, as in a
+garment.  Moreover, he was as black as your hat, quite unlike the
+comely yellow trout who live on the gravel in Clearburn.  It hardly
+seemed sensible to get drowned in this gruesome kind of angling,
+so, leaving the Lake of Darkness, we made for Buccleugh, passing
+the cleugh where the buck was ta'en.  Surely it is the deepest, the
+steepest, and the greenest cleugh that is shone on by the sun!
+Thereby we met an angler, an ancient man in hodden grey, strolling
+home from the Rankle burn.  And we told him of our bad day, and
+asked him concerning that hideous fly, which had covered the loch
+and lured the trout from our decent Greenwells and March browns.
+And the ancient man listened to our description of the monster, and
+He said:  "Hoot, ay; ye've jest forgathered wi' the Bloody Doctor."
+
+This, it appears, is the Border angler's name for the horrible
+insect, so much appreciated by trout.  So we drove home, when all
+the great table-land was touched with yellow light from a rift in
+the west, and all the broken hills looked blue against the silvery
+grey.  God bless them! for man cannot spoil them, nor any
+revolution shape them other than they are.  We see them as the folk
+from Flodden saw them, as Leyden knew them, as they looked to
+William of Deloraine, as they showed in the eyes of Wat of Harden
+and of Jamie Telfer of the Fair Dodhead.  They have always girdled
+a land of warriors and of people fond of song, from the oldest
+ballad-maker to that Scotch Probationer who wrote,
+
+
+Lay me here, where I may see
+Teviot round his meadows flowing,
+And about and over me
+Winds and clouds for ever going.
+
+
+It was dark before we splashed through the ford of Borthwick Water,
+and dined, and wrote to Mr. Anderson of Princes Street, Edinburgh,
+for a supply of Bloody Doctors.  But we never had a chance to try
+them.  I have since fished Clearburn from a boat, but it was not a
+day of rising fish, and no big ones came to the landing-net.  There
+are plenty in the loch, but you need not make the weary journey;
+they are not for you nor me.
+
+
+
+THE LADY OR THE SALMON?
+
+
+
+The circumstances which attended and caused the death of the Hon.
+Houghton Grannom have not long been known to me, and it is only now
+that, by the decease of his father, Lord Whitchurch, and the
+extinction of his noble family, I am permitted to divulge the
+facts.  That the true tale of my unhappy friend will touch
+different chords in different breasts, I am well aware.  The
+sportsman, I think, will hesitate to approve him; the fair, I hope,
+will absolve.  Who are we, to scrutinise human motives, and to
+award our blame to actions which, perhaps, might have been our own,
+had opportunity beset and temptation beguiled us?  There is a
+certain point at which the keenest sense of honour, the most
+chivalrous affection and devotion, cannot bear the strain, but
+break like a salmon line under a masterful stress.  That my friend
+succumbed, I admit; that he was his own judge, the severest, and
+passed and executed sentence on himself, I have now to show.
+
+I shall never forget the shock with which I read in the "Scotsman,"
+under "Angling," the following paragraph:
+
+"Tweed.--Strange Death of an Angler.--An unfortunate event has cast
+a gloom over fishers in this district.  As Mr. K-, the keeper on
+the B- water, was busy angling yesterday, his attention was caught
+by some object floating on the stream.  He cast his flies over it,
+and landed a soft felt hat, the ribbon stuck full of salmon-flies.
+Mr. K- at once hurried up-stream, filled with the most lively
+apprehensions.  These were soon justified.  In a shallow, below the
+narrow, deep and dangerous rapids called "The Trows," Mr. K- saw a
+salmon leaping in a very curious manner.  On a closer examination,
+he found that the fish was attached to a line.  About seventy yards
+higher he found, in shallow water, the body of a man, the hand
+still grasping in death the butt of the rod, to which the salmon
+was fast, all the line being run out.  Mr. K- at once rushed into
+the stream, and dragged out the body, in which he recognised with
+horror the Hon. Houghton Grannom, to whom the water was lately let.
+Life had been for some minutes extinct, and though Mr. K- instantly
+hurried for Dr. -, that gentleman could only attest the melancholy
+fact.  The wading in "The Trows" is extremely dangerous and
+difficult, and Mr. Grannom, who was fond of fishing without an
+attendant, must have lost his balance, slipped, and been dragged
+down by the weight of his waders.  The recent breaking off of the
+hon. gentleman's contemplated marriage on the very wedding-day will
+be fresh in the memory of our readers."
+
+This was the story which I read in the newspaper during breakfast
+one morning in November.  I was deeply grieved, rather than
+astonished, for I have often remonstrated with poor Grannom on the
+recklessness of his wading.  It was with some surprise that I
+received, in the course of the day, a letter from him, in which he
+spoke only of indifferent matters, of the fishing which he had
+taken, and so forth.  The letter was accompanied, however, by a
+parcel.  Tearing off the outer cover, I found a sealed document
+addressed to me, with the superscription, "Not to be opened until
+after my father's decease."  This injunction, of course, I have
+scrupulously obeyed.  The death of Lord Whitchurch, the last of the
+Grannoms, now gives me liberty to publish my friend's Apologia pro
+morte et vita sua.
+
+"Dear Smith" (the document begins), "Before you read this--long
+before, I hope--I shall have solved the great mystery--if, indeed,
+we solve it.  If the water runs down to-morrow, and there is every
+prospect that it will do so, I must have the opportunity of making
+such an end as even malignity cannot suspect of being voluntary.
+There are plenty of fish in the water; if I hook one in "The
+Trows," I shall let myself go whither the current takes me.  Life
+has for weeks been odious to me; for what is life without honour,
+without love, and coupled with shame and remorse?  Repentance I
+cannot call the emotion which gnaws me at the heart, for in similar
+circumstances (unlikely as these are to occur) I feel that I would
+do the same thing again.
+
+"Are we but automata, worked by springs, moved by the stronger
+impulse, and unable to choose for ourselves which impulse that
+shall be?  Even now, in decreeing my own destruction, do I exercise
+free-will, or am I the sport of hereditary tendencies, of mistaken
+views of honour, of a seeming self-sacrifice, which, perhaps, is
+but selfishness in disguise?  I blight my unfortunate father's old
+age; I destroy the last of an ancient house; but I remove from the
+path of Olive Dunne the shadow that must rest upon the sunshine of
+what will eventually, I trust, be a happy life, unvexed by memories
+of one who loved her passionately.  Dear Olive! how pure, how
+ardent was my devotion to her none knows better than you.  But
+Olive had, I will not say a fault, though I suffer from it, but a
+quality, or rather two qualities, which have completed my misery.
+Lightly as she floats on the stream of society, the most casual
+observer, and even the enamoured beholder, can see that Olive Dunne
+has great pride, and no sense of humour.  Her dignity is her idol.
+What makes her, even for a moment, the possible theme of ridicule
+is in her eyes an unpardonable sin.  This sin, I must with
+penitence confess, I did indeed commit.  Another woman might have
+forgiven me.  I know not how that may be; I throw myself on the
+mercy of the court.  But, if another could pity and pardon, to
+Olive this was impossible.  I have never seen her since that fatal
+moment when, paler than her orange blossoms, she swept through the
+porch of the church, while I, dishevelled, mud-stained, half-
+drowned--ah! that memory will torture me if memory at all remains.
+And yet, fool, maniac, that I was, I could not resist the wild, mad
+impulse to laugh which shook the rustic spectators, and which in my
+case was due, I trust, to hysterical but NOT unmanly emotion.  If
+any woman, any bride, could forgive such an apparent but most
+unintentional insult, Olive Dunne, I knew, was not that woman.  My
+abject letters of explanation, my appeals for mercy, were returned
+unopened.  Her parents pitied me, perhaps had reasons for being on
+my side, but Olive was of marble.  It is not only myself that she
+cannot pardon, she will never, I know, forgive herself while my
+existence reminds her of what she had to endure.  When she receives
+the intelligence of my demise, no suspicion will occur to her; she
+will not say "He is fitly punished;" but her peace of mind will
+gradually return.
+
+It is for this, mainly, that I sacrifice myself, but also because I
+cannot endure the dishonour of a laggard in love and a recreant
+bridegroom.
+
+So much for my motives:  now to my tale.
+
+The day before our wedding-day had been the happiest in my life.
+Never had I felt so certain of Olive's affections, never so
+fortunate in my own.  We parted in the soft moonlight; she, no
+doubt, to finish her nuptial preparations; I, to seek my couch in
+the little rural inn above the roaring waters of the Budon. {3}
+
+
+Move eastward, happy earth, and leave
+Yon orange sunset fading slow;
+From fringes of the faded eve
+Oh, happy planet, eastward go,
+
+
+I murmured, though the atmospheric conditions were not really those
+described by the poet.
+
+
+"Ah, bear me with thee, smoothly borne,
+Dip forward under starry light,
+And move me to my marriage morn,
+And round again to -
+
+
+"River in grand order, sir," said the voice of Robins, the keeper,
+who recognised me in the moonlight.  "There's a regular monster in
+the Ashweil," he added, naming a favourite cast; "never saw nor
+heard of such a fish in the water before."
+
+"Mr. Dick must catch him, Robins," I answered; "no fishing for me
+to-morrow."
+
+"No, sir," said Robins, affably.  "Wish you joy, sir, and Miss
+Olive, too.  It's a pity, though!  Master Dick, he throws a fine
+fly, but he gets flurried with a big fish, being young.  And this
+one is a topper."
+
+With that he gave me good-night, and I went to bed, but not to
+sleep.  I was fevered with happiness; the past and future reeled
+before my wakeful vision.  I heard every clock strike; the sounds
+of morning were astir, and still I could not sleep.  The ceremony,
+for reasons connected with our long journey to my father's place in
+Hampshire, was to be early--half-past ten was the hour.  I looked
+at my watch; it was seven of the clock, and then I looked out of
+the window:  it was a fine, soft grey morning, with a south wind
+tossing the yellowing boughs.  I got up, dressed in a hasty way,
+and thought I would just take a look at the river.  It was, indeed,
+in glorious order, lapping over the top of the sharp stone which we
+regarded as a measure of the due size of water.
+
+The morning was young, sleep was out of the question; I could not
+settle my mind to read.  Why should I not take a farewell cast,
+alone, of course?  I always disliked the attendance of a gillie.  I
+took my salmon rod out of its case, rigged it up, and started for
+the stream, which flowed within a couple of hundred yards of my
+quarters.  There it raced under the ash tree, a pale delicate
+brown, perhaps a little thing too coloured.  I therefore put on a
+large Silver Doctor, and began steadily fishing down the ash-tree
+cast.  What if I should wipe Dick's eye, I thought, when, just
+where the rough and smooth water meet, there boiled up a head and
+shoulders such as I had never seen on any fish.  My heart leaped
+and stood still, but there came no sensation from the rod, and I
+finished the cast, my knees actually trembling beneath me.  Then I
+gently lifted the line, and very elaborately tested every link of
+the powerful casting-line.  Then I gave him ten minutes by my
+watch; next, with unspeakable emotion, I stepped into the stream
+and repeated the cast.  Just at the same spot he came up again; the
+huge rod bent like a switch, and the salmon rushed straight down
+the pool, as if he meant to make for the sea.  I staggered on to
+dry land to follow him the easier, and dragged at my watch to time
+the fish; a quarter to eight.  But the slim chain had broken, and
+the watch, as I hastily thrust it back, missed my pocket and fell
+into the water.  There was no time to stoop for it; the fish
+started afresh, tore up the pool as fast as he had gone down it,
+and, rushing behind the torrent, into the eddy at the top, leaped
+clean out of the water.  He was 70 lbs. if he was an ounce.  Here
+he slackened a little, dropping back, and I got in some line.  Now
+he sulked so intensely that I thought he had got the line round a
+rock.  It might be broken, might be holding fast to a sunken stone,
+for aught that I could tell; and the time was passing, I knew not
+how rapidly.  I tried all known methods, tugging at him, tapping
+the butt, and slackening line on him.  At last the top of the rod
+was slightly agitated, and then, back flew the long line in my
+face.  Gone!  I reeled up with a sigh, but the line tightened
+again.  He had made a sudden rush under my bank, but there he lay
+again like a stone.  How long?  Ah!  I cannot tell how long!  I
+heard the church clock strike, but missed the number of the
+strokes.  Soon he started again down-stream into the shallows,
+leaping at the end of his rush--the monster.  Then he came slowly
+up, and "jiggered" savagely at the line.  It seemed impossible that
+any tackle could stand these short violent jerks.  Soon he showed
+signs of weakening.  Once his huge silver side appeared for a
+moment near the surface, but he retreated to his old fastness.  I
+was in a tremor of delight and despair.  I should have thrown down
+my rod, and flown on the wings of love to Olive and the altar.  But
+I hoped that there was time still--that it was not so very late!
+At length he was failing.  I heard ten o'clock strike.  He came up
+and lumbered on the surface of the pool.  Gradually I drew him,
+plunging ponderously, to the gravelled beach, where I meant to
+"tail" him.  He yielded to the strain, he was in the shallows, the
+line was shortened.  I stooped to seize him.  The frayed and
+overworn gut broke at a knot, and with a loose roll he dropped back
+towards the deep.  I sprang at him, stumbled, fell on him,
+struggled with him, but he slipped from my arms.  In that moment I
+knew more than the anguish of Orpheus.  Orpheus!  Had I, too, lost
+my Eurydice?  I rushed from the stream, up the steep bank, along to
+my rooms.  I passed the church door.  Olive, pale as her orange-
+blossoms, was issuing from the porch.  The clock pointed to 10.45.
+I was ruined, I knew it, and I laughed.  I laughed like a lost
+spirit.  She swept past me, and, amidst the amazement of the gentle
+and simple, I sped wildly away.  Ask me no more.  The rest is
+silence."
+
+* * *
+
+Thus ends my hapless friend's narrative.  I leave it to the
+judgment of women and of men.  Ladies, would you have acted as
+Olive Dunne acted?  Would pride, or pardon, or mirth have ridden
+sparkling in your eyes?  Men, my brethren, would ye have deserted
+the salmon for the lady, or the lady for the salmon?  I know what I
+would have done had I been fair Olive Dunne.  What I would have
+done had I been Houghton Grannom I may not venture to divulge.  For
+this narrative, then, as for another, "Let every man read it as he
+will, and every woman as the gods have given her wit." {4}
+
+
+
+A TWEEDSIDE SKETCH
+
+
+
+The story of the following adventure--this deplorable confession,
+one may say--will not have been written in vain if it impresses on
+young minds the supreme necessity of carefulness about details.
+Let the "casual" and regardless who read it--the gatless, as they
+say in Suffolk--ponder the lesson which it teaches:  a lesson which
+no amount of bitter experience has ever impressed on the
+unprincipled narrator.  Never do anything carelessly whether in
+fishing or in golf, and carry this important maxim even into the
+most serious affairs of life.  Many a battle has been lost, no
+doubt, by lack of ammunition, or by plenty of ammunition which did
+not happen to suit the guns; and many a salmon has been lost, ay,
+and many a trout, for want of carefulness, and through a culpable
+inattention to the soundness of your gut, and tackle generally.
+What fiend is it that prompts a man just to try a hopeless cast, in
+a low water, without testing his tackle?  As sure as you do that,
+up comes the fish, and with his first dash breaks your casting
+line, and leaves you lamenting.  This doctrine I preach, being my
+own "awful example."  "Bad and careless little boy," my worthy
+master used to say at school; and he would have provoked a smile in
+other circumstances.  But Mr. Trotter, of the Edinburgh Academy,
+had something about him (he usually carried it in the tail-pocket
+of his coat) which inspired respect and discouraged ribaldry.
+Would that I had listened to Mr. Trotter; would that I had
+corrected, in early life, the happy-go-lucky disposition to scatter
+my Greek accents, as it were, with a pepper-caster, to fish with
+worn tackle, and, generally, to make free with the responsibilities
+of life and literature.  It is too late to amend, but others may
+learn wisdom from this spectacle of deserved misfortune and
+absolute discomfiture.
+
+I am not myself a salmon-fisher, though willing to try that art
+again, and though this is a tale of salmon.  To myself the
+difference between angling for trout and angling for salmon is like
+the difference between a drawing of Lionardo's, in silver point,
+and a loaded landscape by MacGilp, R.A.  Trout-fishing is all an
+idyll, all delicacy--that is, trout-fishing on the Test or on the
+Itchen.  You wander by clear water, beneath gracious poplar-trees,
+unencumbered with anything but a slim rod of Messrs. Hardy's make,
+and a light toy-box of delicate flies.  You need seldom wade, and
+the water is shallow, the bottom is of silver gravel.  You need not
+search all day at random, but you select a rising trout, and
+endeavour to lay the floating fly delicately over him.  If you part
+with him, there is always another feeding merrily:
+
+
+Invenies alium si te hic fastidit.
+
+
+It is like an excursion into Corot's country, it is rich in
+memories of Walton and Cotton:  it is a dream of peace, and they
+bring you your tea by the riverside.  In salmon-fishing, on the
+Tweed at least, all is different.  The rod, at all events the rod
+which some one kindly lent me, is like a weaver's beam.  The high
+heavy wading trousers and boots are even as the armour of the giant
+of Gath.  You have to plunge waist deep, or deeper, into roaring
+torrents, and if the water be at all "drumly" you have not an idea
+where your next step may fall.  It may be on a hidden rock, or on a
+round slippery boulder, or it may be into a deep "pot" or hole.
+The inexperienced angler staggers like a drunken man, is
+occasionally drowned, and more frequently is ducked.  You have to
+cast painfully, with steep precipitous banks behind you, all
+overgrown with trees, with bracken, with bramble.  It is a boy's
+work to disentangle the fly from the branches of ash and elm and
+pine.  There is no delicacy, and there is a great deal of exertion
+in all this.  You do not cast subtilely over a fish which you know
+is there, but you swish, swish, all across the current, with a
+strong reluctance to lift the line after each venture and try
+another.  The small of the back aches, and it is literally in the
+sweat of your brow that you take your diversion.  After all, there
+are many blank days, when the salmon will look at no fly, or when
+you encounter the Salmo irritans, who rises with every appearance
+of earnest good-will, but never touches the hook, or, if he does
+touch it, runs out a couple of yards of line, and vanishes for
+ever.  What says the poet?
+
+
+There's an accommodating fish,
+In pool or stream, by rock or pot,
+Who rises frequent as you wish,
+At "Popham," "Parson," or "Jock Scott,"
+Or almost any fly you've got
+In all the furred and feathered clans.
+You strike, but ah, you strike him not
+He is the Salmo irritans!
+
+
+It may be different in Norway or on the lower casts of the Tweed,
+as at Floors, or Makerstoun; but higher up the country, in Scott's
+own country, at Yair or Ashiesteil, there is often a terrible
+amount of fruitless work to be done.  And I doubt if, except in
+throwing a very long line, and knowing the waters by old
+experience, there is very much skill in salmon-fishing.  It is all
+an affair of muscle and patience.  The choice of flies is almost a
+pure accident.  Every one believes in the fly with which he has
+been successful.  These strange combinations of blues, reds, golds,
+of tinsel and worsted, of feathers and fur, are purely fantastic
+articles.  They are like nothing in nature, and are multiplied for
+the fanciful amusement of anglers.  Nobody knows why salmon rise at
+them; nobody knows why they will bite on one day and not on
+another, or rather, on many others.  It is not even settled whether
+we should use a bright fly on a bright day, and a dark fly on a
+dark day, as Dr. Hamilton advises, or reverse the choice as others
+use.  Muscles and patience, these, I repeat, are the only
+ingredients of ultimate success.
+
+However, one does do at Rome as the Romans do, and fishes for
+salmon in Tweed when the nets are off in October, when the
+yellowing leaves begin to fall, and when that beautiful reach of
+wooded valley from Elibank to the meeting of Tweed and Ettrick is
+in the height of its autumnal charm.  Why has Yarrow been so much
+more besung than Tweed, in spite of the greater stream's far
+greater and more varied loveliness?  The fatal duel in the Dowie
+Dens of Yarrow and the lamented drowning of Willie there have given
+the stream its 'pastoral melancholy,' and engaged Wordsworth in the
+renown of the water.  For the poetry of Tweed we have chiefly,
+after Scott, to thank Mr. Stoddart, its loyal minstrel.  "Dearer
+than all these to me," he says about our other valleys, "is sylvan
+Tweed."
+
+
+Let ither anglers choose their ain,
+And ither waters tak' the lead
+O' Hieland streams we covet nane,
+But gie to us the bonny Tweed;
+And gie to us the cheerfu' burn,
+That steals into its valley fair,
+The streamlets that, at ilka turn,
+Sae saftly meet and mingle there.
+
+
+He kept his promise, given in the following verse:
+
+
+And I, when to breathe is a labour, and joy
+Forgets me, and life is no longer the boy,
+On the labouring staff, and the tremorous knee,
+Will wander, bright river, to thee!
+
+
+Life is always "the boy" when one is beside the Tweed.  Times
+change, and we change, for the worse.  But the river changes
+little.  Still he courses through the keen and narrow rocks beneath
+the bridge of Yair.
+
+
+From Yair, which hills so closely bind,
+Scarce can the Tweed his passage find,
+Though much he fret, and chafe, and toil,
+Till all his eddying currents boil.
+
+
+Still the water loiters by the long boat-pool of Yair, as though
+loath to leave the drooping boughs of the elms.  Still it courses
+with a deep eddy through the Elm Wheel, and ripples under Fernilea,
+where the author of the "Flowers of the Forest" lived in that now
+mouldering and roofless hall, with the peaked turrets.  Still
+Neidpath is fair, Neidpath of the unhappy maid, and still we mark
+the tiny burn at Ashiesteil, how in November,
+
+
+Murmuring hoarse, and frequent seen,
+Through bush and briar, no longer green,
+An angry brook, it sweeps the glade,
+Brawls over rock and wild cascade,
+And foaming brown, with doubled speed,
+Hurries its waters to the Tweed.
+
+
+Still the old tower of Elibank is black and strong in ruin;
+Elibank, the home of that Muckle Mou'd Meg, who made Harden after
+all a better bride than he would have found in the hanging ash-tree
+of her father.  These are unaltered, mainly, since Scott saw them
+last, and little altered is the homely house of Ashiesteil, where
+he had been so happy.  And we, too, feel but little change among
+those scenes of long ago, those best-beloved haunts of boyhood,
+where we have had so many good days and bad, days of rising trout
+and success; days of failure, and even of half-drowning.
+
+One cannot reproduce the charm of the strong river in pool and
+stream, of the steep rich bank that it rushes or lingers by, of the
+green and heathery hills beyond, or the bare slopes where the blue
+slate breaks through among the dark old thorn-trees, remnants of
+the forest.  It is all homely and all haunted, and, if a Tweedside
+fisher might have his desire, he would sleep the long sleep in the
+little churchyard that lies lonely above the pool of Caddon-foot,
+and hard by Christopher North's favourite quarters at Clovenfords.
+
+However, while we are still on earth, Caddon-foot is more
+attractive for her long sweep of salmon-pool--the home of sea-trout
+too--than precisely for her kirk-yard.  There will be time enough
+for that, and time it is to recur to the sad story of the big fish
+and the careless angler.  It was about the first day of October,
+and we had enjoyed a "spate."  Salmon-fishing is a mere child of
+the weather; with rain almost anybody may raise fish, without it
+all art is apt to be vain.  We had been blessed with a spate.  On
+Wednesday the Tweed had been roaring red from bank to bank.
+Salmon-fishing was wholly out of the question, and it is to be
+feared that the innumerable trout-fishers, busy on every eddy, were
+baiting with salmon roe, an illegal lure.  On Thursday the red
+tinge had died out of the water, but only a very strong wader would
+have ventured in; others had a good chance, if they tried it, of
+being picked up at Berwick.  Friday was the luckless day of my own
+failure and broken heart.  The water was still very heavy and
+turbid, a frantic wind was lashing the woods, heaps of dead leaves
+floated down, and several sheaves of corn were drifted on the
+current.  The long boat-pool at Yair, however, is sheltered by
+wooded banks, and it was possible enough to cast, in spite of the
+wind's fury.  We had driven from a place about five miles distant,
+and we had not driven three hundred yards before I remembered that
+we had forgotten the landing-net.  But, as I expected nothing, it
+did not seem worth while to go back for this indispensable
+implement.  We reached the water-side, and found that the trout
+were feeding below the pendent branches of the trees and in the
+quiet, deep eddies of the long boat-pool.  One cannot see rising
+trout without casting over them, in preference to labouring after
+salmon, so I put up a small rod and diverted myself from the bank.
+It was to little purpose.  Tweed trout are now grown very shy and
+capricious; even a dry fly failed to do any execution worth
+mentioning.  Conscience compelled me, as I had been sent out by
+kind hosts to fish for salmon, not to neglect my orders.  The
+armour--the ponderous gear of the fisher--was put on with the
+enormous boots, and the gigantic rod was equipped.  Then came the
+beginning of sorrows.  We had left the books of salmon flies
+comfortably reposing at home.  We had also forgotten the whiskey
+flask.  Everything, in fact, except cigarettes, had been left
+behind.  Unluckily, not quite everything:  I had a trout fly-book,
+and therein lay just one large salmon fly, not a Tweed fly, but a
+lure that is used on the beautiful and hopeless waters of the
+distant Ken, in Galloway.  It had brown wings, a dark body, and a
+piece of jungle-cock feather, and it was fastened to a sea-trout
+casting-line.  Now, if I had possessed no salmon flies at all, I
+must either have sent back for some, or gone on innocently dallying
+with trout.  But this one wretched fly lured me to my ruin.  I saw
+that the casting-line had a link which seemed rather twisted.  I
+tried it; but, in the spirit of Don Quixote with his helmet, I did
+not try it hard.  I waded into the easiest-looking part of the
+pool, just above a huge tree that dropped its boughs to the water,
+and began casting, merely from a sense of duty.  I had not cast a
+dozen times before there was a heavy, slow plunge in the stream,
+and a glimpse of purple and azure.
+
+"That's him," cried a man who was trouting on the opposite bank.
+Doubtless it was "him," but he had not touched the hook.  I believe
+the correct thing would have been to wait for half an hour, and
+then try the fish with a smaller fly.  But I had no smaller fly, no
+other fly at all.  I stepped back a few paces, and fished down
+again.  In Major Traherne's work I have read that the heart leaps,
+or stands still, or otherwise betrays an uncomfortable interest,
+when one casts for the second time over a salmon which has risen.
+I cannot honestly say that I suffered from this tumultuous emotion.
+"He will not come again," I said, when there was a long heavy drag
+at the line, followed by a shrieking of the reel, as in Mr. William
+Black's novels.  Let it be confessed that the first hooking of a
+salmon is an excitement unparalleled in trout-fishing.  There have
+been anglers who, when the salmon was once on, handed him over to
+the gillie to play and land.  One would like to act as gillie to
+those lordly amateurs.  My own fish rushed down stream, where the
+big tree stands.  I had no hope of landing him if he took that
+course, because one could neither pass the rod under the boughs,
+nor wade out beyond them.  But he soon came back, while one took in
+line, and discussed his probable size with the trout-fisher
+opposite.  His size, indeed!  Nobody knows what it was, for when he
+had come up to the point whence he had started, he began a policy
+of violent short tugs--not "jiggering," as it is called, but
+plunging with all his weight on the line.  I had clean forgotten
+the slimness of the tackle, and, as he was clearly well hooked,
+held him perhaps too hard.  Only a very raw beginner likes to take
+hours over landing a fish.  Perhaps I held him too tight:  at all
+events, after a furious plunge, back came the line; the casting
+line had snapped at the top link.
+
+There was no more to be said or done, except to hunt for another
+fly in the trout fly-book.  Here there was no such thing, but a
+local spectator offered me a huge fly, more like a gaff, and
+equipped with a large iron eye for attaching the gut to.  Withal I
+suspect this weapon was meant, not for fair fishing, but for
+"sniggling."  Now "sniggling" is a form of cold-blooded poaching.
+In the open water, on the Ettrick, you may see half a dozen
+snigglers busy.  They all wear high wading trousers; they are all
+armed with stiff salmon-rods and huge flies.  They push the line
+and the top joints of the rod deep into the water, drag it along,
+and then bring the hook out with a jerk.  Often it sticks in the
+side of a salmon, and in this most unfair and unsportsmanlike way
+the free sport of honest people is ruined, and fish are diminished
+in number.  Now, the big fly MAY have been an honest character, but
+he was sadly like a rake-hook in disguise.  He did not look as if
+an fish could fancy him.  I, therefore, sent a messenger across the
+river to beg, buy, or borrow a fly at "The Nest."  But this pretty
+cottage is no longer the home of the famous angling club, which has
+gone a mile or two up the water and builded for itself a new
+dwelling.  My messenger came back with one small fatigued-looking
+fly, a Popham, I think, which had been lent by some one at a farm-
+house.  The water was so heavy that the small fly seemed useless;
+however, we fastened it on as a dropper, using the sniggler as the
+trail fly; so exhausted were our resources, that I had to cut a
+piece of gut off a minnow tackle and attach the small fly to that.
+The tiny gut loop of the fly was dreadfully frayed, and with a
+heavy heart I began fishing again.  My friend on the opposite side
+called out that big fish were rising in the bend of the stream, so
+thither I went, stumbling over rocks, and casting with much
+difficulty, as the high overgrown banks permit no backward sweep of
+the line.  You are obliged to cast by a kind of forward thrust of
+the arms, a knack not to be acquired in a moment.  I splashed away
+awkwardly, but at last managed to make a straight, clean cast.
+There was a slight pull, such as a trout gives in mid-stream under
+water.  I raised the point, and again the reel sang aloud and
+gleefully as the salmon rushed down the stream farther and faster
+than the first.  It is a very pleasant thing to hook a salmon when
+you are all alone, as I was then--alone with yourself and the
+Goddess of Fishing.  This salmon, just like the other, now came
+back, and instantly began the old tactics of heavy plunging tugs.
+But I knew the gut was sound this time, and as I fancied he had
+risen to the sniggler, I had no anxiety about the tackle holding.
+One more plunge, and back came the line as before.  He was off.
+One could have sat down and gnawed the reel.  What had gone wrong?
+Why, the brute had taken the old fly from the farmhouse and had
+snapped the loop that attaches the gut.  The little loop was still
+on the fragment of minnow tackle which fastened it to the cast.
+
+There was no more chance, for there were now no more flies, except
+a small "cobbery," a sea-trout fly from the Sound of Mull.  It was
+time for us to go, with a heavy heart and a basket empty, except
+for two or three miserable trout.  The loss of those two salmon,
+whether big or little fish, was not the whole misfortune.  All the
+chances of the day were gone, and seldom have salmon risen so
+freely.  I had not been casting long enough to smoke half a
+cigarette, when I hooked each of those fish.  They rose at flies
+which were the exact opposites of each other in size, character,
+and colour.  They were ready to rise at anything but the sniggler.
+And I had nothing to offer them, absolutely nothing bigger than a
+small red-spinner from the Test.  On that day a fisher, not far
+off, hooked nine salmon and landed four of them, in one pool, I
+never had such a chance before; the heavy flood and high wind had
+made the salmon as "silly" as perch.  One might have caught half a
+dozen of the great sturdy fellows, who make all trout, even sea-
+trout, seem despicable minnows.  Next day I fished again in the
+same water, with a friend.  I rose a fish, but did not hook it, and
+he landed a small one, five minutes after we started, and we only
+had one other rise all the rest of the day.  Probably it was not
+dark and windy enough, but who can explain the caprices of salmon?
+The only certain thing is, that carelessness always brings
+misfortune; that if your tackle is weak fish will hook themselves
+on days, and in parts of the water, where you expected nothing, and
+then will go away with your fly and your casting-lines.  Fortune
+never forgives.  He who is lazy, and takes no trouble because he
+expects no fish, will always be meeting heart-breaking adventures.
+One should never make a hopeless or careless cast; bad luck lies in
+wait for that kind of performance.  These are the experiences that
+embitter a man, as they embittered Dean Swift, who, old and ill,
+neglected and in Irish exile, still felt the pang of losing a great
+trout when he was a boy.  What pleasure is there in landscape and
+tradition when such accidents befall you?
+
+
+The sun upon the Weirdlaw hill,
+In Ettrick's vale is sinking sweet.
+
+
+There is a fire of autumn colour in the tufted woods that embosom
+Fernilea.  "Bother the setting sun," we say, and the Maid of
+Neidpath, and the "Flowers of the Forest," and the memories of
+Scott at Ashiesteil, and of Muckle Mou'd Meg, at Elibank.  These
+are filmy, shadowy pleasures of the fancy, these cannot minister to
+the mind of him who has been "broken" twice, who cannot resume the
+contest for want of ammunition, and who has not even brought the
+creature-comfort of a flask.  Since that woful day I have lain on
+the bank and watched excellent anglers skilfully flogging the best
+of water, and that water full of fish, without hooking one.
+Salmon-fishing, then, is a matter of chance, or of plodding
+patience.  They will rise on one day at almost any fly (but the
+sniggler), however ill-presented to them.  On a dozen other days no
+fly and no skill will avail to tempt them.  The salmon is a
+brainless brute and the grapes are sour!
+
+If only the gut had held, this sketch would have ended with
+sentiment, and a sunset, and the music of Ettrick, the melody of
+Tweed.  In the gloaming we'd be roaming homeward, telling, perhaps,
+the story of the ghost seen by Sir Walter Scott near Ashiesteil, or
+discussing the Roman treasure still buried near Oakwood Tower,
+under an inscribed stone which men saw fifty years ago.  Or was it
+a treasure of Michael Scott's, who lived at Oakwood, says
+tradition?  Let Harden dig for Harden's gear, it is not for me to
+give hints as to its whereabouts.  After all that ill-luck, to be
+brief, one is not in the vein for legendary lore, nor memories of
+boyhood, nor poetry, nor sunsets.  I do not believe that one ever
+thinks of the landscape or of anything else, while there is a
+chance for a fish, and no abundance of local romance can atone for
+an empty creel.  Poetical  fishers try to make people believe these
+fallacies; perhaps they impose on themselves; but if one would
+really enjoy landscape, one should leave, not only the fly-book and
+the landing-net, but the rod and reel at home.  And so farewell to
+the dearest and fairest of all rivers that go on earth, fairer than
+Eurotas or Sicilian Anapus with its sea-trout; farewell--for who
+knows how long?--to the red-fringed Gleddis-wheel, the rock of the
+Righ-wheel, the rushing foam of the Gullets, the woodland banks of
+Caddon-foot.
+
+
+The valleys of England are wide,
+Her rivers rejoice every one,
+In grace and in beauty they glide,
+And water-flowers float at their side,
+As they gleam in the rays of the sun.
+
+But where are the speed and the spray -
+The dark lakes that welter them forth,
+Tree and heath nodding over their way -
+The rock and the precipice grey,
+That bind the wild streams of the North?
+
+
+Well, both, are good, the streams of north and south, but he who
+has given his heart to the Tweed, as did Tyro, in Homer, to the
+Enipeus will never change his love.
+
+P.S.--That Galloway fly--"The Butcher and Lang"--has been avenged.
+A copy of him, on the line of a friend, has proved deadly on the
+Tweed, killing, among other victims, a sea-trout of thirteen
+pounds.
+
+
+
+THE DOUBLE ALIBI
+
+
+
+Glen Aline is probably the loneliest place in the lone moorlands of
+Western Galloway.  The country is entirely pastoral, and I fancy
+that the very pasture is bad enough.  Stretches of deer-grass and
+ling, rolling endlessly to the feet of Cairnsmure and the circle of
+the eastern hills, cannot be good feeding for the least Epicurean
+of sheep, and sheep do not care for the lank and sour herbage by
+the sides of the "lanes," as the half-stagnant, black, deep, and
+weedy burns are called in this part of the country.  The scenery is
+not unattractive, but tourists never wander to these wastes where
+no inns are, and even the angler seldom visits them.  Indeed, the
+fishing is not to be called good, and the "lanes," which "seep," as
+the Scotch say, through marshes and beneath low hillsides, are not
+such excellent company as the garrulous and brawling brooks of the
+Border or of the Highlands.  As the lanes flow, however, from far-
+away lochs, it happens that large trout make their way into them--
+trout which, if hooked, offer a gallant resistance before they can
+be hauled over the weeds that usually line the watercourses.
+
+Partly for the sake of trying this kind of angling, partly from a
+temporary distaste for the presence of men and women, partly for
+the purpose of finishing a work styled "A History of the
+Unexplained," I once spent a month in the solitudes of Glen Aline.
+I stayed at the house of a shepherd who, though not an
+unintelligent man was by no means possessed of the modern spirit.
+He and his brother swains had sturdily and successfully resisted an
+attempt made by the school-master at a village some seven miles off
+to get a postal service in the glen more frequently than once a
+week.  A post once a week was often enough for lucky people who did
+not get letters twice a year.  It was not my shepherd, but another,
+who once came with his wife to the village, after a twelve miles'
+walk across the hills, to ask "what the day of the week was?"  They
+had lost count, and the man had attended to his work on a day which
+the dame averred to be the Sabbath.  He denied that it WAS the
+Sabbath, and I believe that it turned out to be a Tuesday.  This
+little incident gives some idea of the delightful absence of
+population in Glen Aline.  But no words can paint the utter
+loneliness, which could actually be felt--the empty moors, the
+empty sky.  The heaps of stones by a burnside, here and there,
+showed that a cottage had once existed where now was no habitation.
+One such spot was rather to be shunned by the superstitious, for
+here, about 1698, a cottar family had been evicted by endless
+unaccountable disturbances in the house.  Stones were thrown by
+invisible hands--though occasionally, by the way, a white hand,
+with no apparent body attached to it, WAS viewed by the curious who
+came to the spot.  Heavy objects of all sorts floated in the air;
+rappings and voices were heard; the end wall was pulled down by an
+unknown agency.  The story is extant in a pious old pamphlet called
+"Sadducees Defeated," and a great deal more to the same effect--a
+masterpiece by the parish minister, signed and attested by the
+other ministers of the Glen Kens.  The Edinburgh edition of the
+pamphlet is rare; the London edition may be procured without much
+difficulty.
+
+The site of this ruined cottage, however, had no terrors for the
+neighbours, or rather for the neighbour, my shepherd.  In fact, he
+seemed to have forgotten the legend till I reminded him of it, for
+I had come across the tale in my researches into the Unexplained.
+The shepherd and his family, indeed, were quite devoid of
+superstition, and in this respect very unlike the northern
+Highlanders.  However, the fallen cottage had nothing to do with my
+own little adventure in Glen Aline, and I mention it merely as the
+most notable of the tiny ruins which attest the presence, in the
+past, of a larger population.  One cannot marvel that the people
+"flitted" from the moors and morasses of Glen Aline into less
+melancholy neighbourhoods.  The very sheep seemed scarcer here than
+elsewhere; grouse-disease had devastated the moors, sportsmen
+consequently did not visit them; and only a few barren pairs, with
+crow-picked skeletons of dead birds in the heather now and then,
+showed that the shootings had once perhaps been marketable.  My
+shepherd's cottage was four miles from the little-travelled road to
+Dalmellington; long bad miles they were, across bog and heather.
+Consequently I seldom saw any face of man, except in or about the
+cottage.  My work went on rapidly enough in such an undisturbed
+life.  Empires might fall, parties might break like bursting
+shells, and banks might break also:  I plodded on with my labour,
+and went a-fishing when the day promised well.  There was a hill
+loch (Loch Nan) about five miles away, which I favoured a good
+deal.  The trout were large and fair of flesh, and in proper
+weather they rose pretty freely, and could be taken by an angler
+wading from the shore.  There was no boat.  The wading, however,
+was difficult and dangerous, owing to the boggy nature of the
+bottom, which quaked like a quicksand in some places.  The black
+water, never stirred by duck or moorhen, the dry rustling reeds,
+the noisome smell of decaying vegetable-matter when you stirred it
+up in wading, the occasional presence of a dead sheep by the sullen
+margin of the tarn, were all opposed to cheerfulness.  Still, the
+fish were there, and the "lane," which sulkily glided from the loch
+towards the distant river, contained some monsters, which took worm
+after a flood.  One misty morning, as I had just topped the low
+ridge from which the loch became visible, I saw a man fishing from
+my favourite bench.  Never had I noticed a human being there
+before, and I was not well pleased to think that some emissary of
+Mr. Watson Lyall was making experiments in Loch Nan, and would
+describe it in "The Sportsman's Guide."  The mist blew white and
+thick for a minute or two over the lochside, as it often does at
+Loch Skene; so white and thick and sudden that the bewildered
+angler there is apt to lose his way, and fall over the precipice of
+the Grey Mare's Tail.  When the curtain of cloud rose again, the
+loch was lonely:  the angler had disappeared.  I went on rejoicing,
+and made a pretty good basket, as the weather improved and grew
+warmer--a change which gives an appetite to trout in some hill
+lochs.  Among the sands between the stones on the farther bank I
+found traces of the angler's footsteps; he was not a phantom, at
+all events, for phantoms do not wear heavily nailed boots, as he
+evidently did.  The traces, which were soon lost, of course,
+inclined me to think that he had retreated up a narrow green
+burnside, with rather high banks, through which, in rainy weather,
+a small feeder fell into the loch.  I guessed that he had been
+frightened away by the descent of the mist, which usually "puts
+down" the trout and prevents them from feeding.  In that case his
+alarm was premature.  I marched homewards, happy with the
+unaccustomed weight of my basket, the contents of which were a
+welcome change from the usual porridge and potatoes, tea (without
+milk), jam, and scones of the shepherd's table.  But, as I reached
+the height above the loch on my westward path, and looked back to
+see if rising fish were dimpling the still waters, all flushed as
+they were with sunset, behold, there was the Other Man at work
+again!
+
+I should have thought no more about him had I not twice afterwards
+seen him at a distance, fishing up a "lane" ahead of me, in the
+loneliest regions, and thereby, of course, spoiling my sport.  I
+knew him by his peculiar stoop, which seemed not unfamiliar to me,
+and by his hat, which was of the clerical pattern once known,
+perhaps still known, as "a Bible-reader's"--a low, soft, slouched
+black felt.  The second time that I found him thus anticipating me,
+I left off fishing and walked rather briskly towards him, to
+satisfy my curiosity, and ask the usual questions, "What sport?"
+and "What flies?"  But as soon as he observed me coming he strode
+off across the heather.  Uncourteous as it seems, I felt so
+inquisitive that I followed him.  But he walked so rapidly, and was
+so manifestly anxious to shake me off, that I gave up the pursuit.
+Even if he were a poacher whose conscience smote him for using
+salmon-roe, I was not "my brother's keeper," nor anybody's keeper.
+He might "otter" the loch, but how could I prevent him?
+
+It was no affair of mine, and yet--where had I seen him before?
+His gait, his stoop, the carriage of his head, all seemed familiar-
+-but a short-sighted man is accustomed to this kind of puzzle:  he
+is always recognising the wrong person, when he does not fail to
+recognise the right one.
+
+I am rather short-sighted, but science has its resources.  Two or
+three days after my encounter with this very shy sportsman, I went
+again to Loch Nan.  But this time I took with me a strong field-
+glass.  As I neared the crest of the low heathery slope immediately
+above the loch, whence the water first comes into view, I lay down
+on the ground and crawled like a deer-stalker to the skyline.
+
+Then I got out the glass and reconnoitred.  There was my friend,
+sure enough; moreover, he was playing a very respectable trout.
+But he was fishing on the near side of the loch, and though I had
+quite a distinct view of his back, and indeed of all his attenuated
+form, I was as far as ever from recognising him, or guessing where,
+if anywhere, I had seen him before.  I now determined to stalk him;
+but this was not too easy, as there is literally no cover on the
+hillside except a long march dyke of the usual loose stones, which
+ran down to the loch-side, and indeed three or four feet into the
+loch, reaching it at a short distance to the right of the angler.
+Behind this I skulked, in an eagerly undignified manner, and was
+just about to climb the wall unobserved, when two grouse got up,
+with their wild "cluck cluck" of alarm, and flew down past the
+angler and over the loch.  He did not even look round, but jerked
+his line out of the water, reeled it up, and set off walking along
+the loch-side.  He was making, no doubt, for the little glen up
+which I fancied that he must have retreated on the first occasion
+when saw him.  I set off walking round the tarn on my own side--the
+left side--expecting to anticipate him, and that he must pass me on
+his way up the little burnside.  But I had miscalculated the
+distance, or the pace.  He was first at the burnside; and now I
+cast courtesy and everything but curiosity to the winds, and
+deliberately followed him.  He was a few score of yards ahead of
+me, walking rapidly, when he suddenly climbed the burnside to the
+left, and was lost to my eyes for a few moments.  I reached the
+place, ascended the steep green declivity and found myself on the
+open undulating moor, with no human being in sight!
+
+The grass and heather were short.  I saw no bush, no hollow, where
+he could by any possibility have hidden himself.  Had he met a
+Boojum he could not have more "softly and suddenly vanished away."
+
+I make no pretence of being more courageous than my neighbours,
+and, in this juncture, perhaps I was less so.  The long days of
+loneliness in waste Glen Aline, and too many solitary cigarettes,
+had probably injured my nerve.  So, when I suddenly heard a sigh
+and the half-smothered sound of a convulsive cough-hollow, if ever
+a cough was hollow--hard by me, at my side as it were, and yet
+could behold no man, nor any place where a man might conceal
+himself--nothing but moor and sky and tufts of rushes--then I
+turned away, and walked down the glen:  not slowly.  I shall not
+deny that I often looked over my shoulder as I went, and that, when
+I reached the loch, I did not angle without many a backward glance.
+Such an appearance and disappearance as this, I remembered, were in
+the experience of Sir Walter Scott.  Lockhart does not tell the
+anecdote, which is in a little anonymous volume, "Recollections of
+Sir Walter Scott," published before Lockhart's book.  Sir Walter
+reports that he was once riding across the moor to Ashiesteil, in
+the clear brown summer twilight, after sunset.  He saw a man a
+little way ahead of him, but, just before he reached the spot, the
+man disappeared.  Scott rode about and about, searching the low
+heather as I had done, but to no purpose.  He rode on, and,
+glancing back, saw the same man at the same place.  He turned his
+horse, galloped to the spot, and again--nothing!  "Then," says Sir
+Walter, "neither the mare nor I cared to wait any longer."  Neither
+had I cared to wait, and if there is any shame in the confession,
+on my head be it!
+
+There came a week of blazing summer weather; tramping over moors to
+lochs like sheets of burnished steel was out of the question, and I
+worked at my book, which now was all but finished.  At length I
+wrote THE END, and "o le bon ouff! que je poussais," as Flaubert
+says about one of his own laborious conclusions.  The weather
+broke, we had a deluge, and then came a soft cloudy day, with a
+warm southern wind suggesting a final march on Loch Nan.  I packed
+some scones and marmalade into my creel, filled my flask with
+whiskey, my cigarette-case with cigarettes, and started on the
+familiar track with the happiest anticipations.  The Lone Fisher
+was quite out of my mind; the day was exhilarating--one of those
+true fishing-days when you feel the presence of the sun without
+seeing him.  Still, I looked rather cautiously over the edge of the
+slope above the loch, and, by Jove! there he was, fishing the near
+side, and wading deep among the reeds!  I did not stalk him this
+time, but set off running down the hillside behind him, as quickly
+as my basket, with its load of waders and boots, would permit.  I
+was within forty yards of him, when he gave a wild stagger, tried
+to recover himself, failed, and, this time, disappeared in a
+perfectly legitimate and accountable manner.  The treacherous peaty
+bottom had given way, and his floating hat, with a splash on the
+surface, and a few black bubbles, were all that testified to his
+existence.  There was a broken old paling hard by; I tore off a
+long plank, waded in as near as I dared, and, by help of the plank,
+after a good deal of slipping, which involved an exemplary
+drenching, I succeeded in getting him on to dry land.  He was a
+distressing spectacle--his body and face all blackened with the
+slimy peat-mud; and he fell half-fainting on the grass, convulsed
+by a terrible cough.  My first care was to give him whiskey, by
+perhaps a mistaken impulse of humanity; my next, as he lay,
+exhausted, was to bring water in my hat, and remove the black mud
+from his face.
+
+Then I saw Percy Allen--Allen of St. Jude's!  His face was wasted,
+his thin long beard (he had not worn a beard of old), clogged as it
+was with peat-stains, showed flecks of grey.
+
+"Allen--Percy!" I said; "what wind blew YOU here?"
+
+But he did not answer; and, as he coughed, it was too plain that
+the shock of his accident had broken some vessel in the lungs.  I
+tended him as well as I knew how to do it.  I sat beside him,
+giving him what comfort I might, and all the time my memory flew
+back to college days, and to our strange and most unhappy last
+meeting, and his subsequent inevitable disgrace.  Far away from
+here--Loch Nan and the vacant moors--my memory wandered.
+
+It was at Blocksby's auction-room, in a street near the Strand, on
+the eve of a great book-sale three years before, that we had met,
+for almost the last time, as I believed, though it is true that we
+had not spoken on that occasion.  It is necessary that I should
+explain what occurred, or what I and three other credible witnesses
+believed to have occurred; for, upon my word, the more I see and
+hear of human evidence of any event, the less do I regard it as
+establishing anything better than an excessively probable
+hypothesis.
+
+To make a long story as short as may be, I should say that Allen
+and I had been acquainted when we were undergraduates; that, when
+fellows of our respective colleges, our acquaintance had become
+intimate; that we had once shared a little bit of fishing on the
+Test; and that we were both book-collectors.  I was a comparatively
+sane bibliomaniac, but to Allen the time came when he grudged every
+penny that he did not spend on rare books, and when he actually
+gave up his share of the water we used to take together, that his
+contribution to the rent might go for rare editions and bindings.
+After this deplorable change of character we naturally saw each
+other less, but we were still friendly.  I went up to town to
+scribble; Allen stayed on at Oxford.  One day I chanced to go into
+Blocksby's rooms; it was a Friday, I remember--there was to be a
+great sale on the Monday.  There I met Allen in ecstasies over one
+of the books displayed in the little side room on the right hand of
+the sale-room.  He had taken out of a glass case and was gloating
+over a book which, it seems, had long been the Blue Rose of his
+fancy as a collector.  He was crazed about Longepierre, the old
+French amateur, whose volumes, you may remember, were always bound
+in blue morocco, and tooled, on the centre and at the corners, with
+his badge, the Golden Fleece.  Now the tome which so fascinated
+Allen was a Theocritus, published at Rome by Caliergus--a
+Theocritus on blue paper, if you please, bound in Longepierre's
+morocco livery, double with red morocco, and, oh ecstasy! with a
+copy of Longepierre's version of one Idyll on the flyleaf, signed
+with the translator's initials, and headed "a Mon Roy."  It is
+known to the curious that Louis XIV. particularly admired and
+praised this little poem, calling it "a model of honourable
+gallantry."  Clearly the grateful author had presented his own copy
+to the king; and here it was, when king and crown had gone down
+into dust.
+
+Allen showed me the book; he could hardly let it leave his hands.
+
+"Here is a pearl," he had said, "a gem beyond price!"
+
+"I'm afraid you'll find it so," I said; "that is for a Paillet or
+Rothschild, not for you, my boy."
+
+"I fear so," he had answered; "if I were to sell my whole library
+to-morrow, I could hardly raise the money;" for he was poor, and it
+was rumoured that his mania had already made him acquainted with
+the Jews.
+
+We parted.  I went home to chambers; Allen stayed adoring the
+unexampled Longepierre.  That night I dined out, and happened to
+sit next a young lady who possessed a great deal of taste, though
+that was the least of her charms.  The fashion for book-collecting
+was among her innocent pleasures; she had seen Allen's books at
+Oxford, and I told her of his longings for the Theocritus.  Miss
+Breton at once was eager to see the book, and the other books, and
+I obtained leave to go with her and Mrs. Breton to the auction-
+rooms next day.  The little side-room where the treasures were
+displayed was empty, except for an attendant, when we went in; we
+looked at the things and made learned remarks, but I admit that I
+was more concerned to look at Miss Breton than at any work in
+leather by Derome or Bauzonnet.  We were thus a good deal occupied,
+perhaps, with each other; people came and went, while our heads
+were bent over a case of volumes under the window.  When we DID
+leave, on the appeal of Mrs. Breton, we both--both I and Kate--Miss
+Breton, I mean--saw Allen--at least I saw him, and believed SHE
+did--absorbed in gazing at the Longepierre Theocritus.  He held it
+rather near his face; the gas, which had been lit, fell on the
+shining Golden Fleeces of the cover, on his long thin hands and
+eager studious features.  It would have been a pity to disturb him
+in his ecstasy.  I looked at Miss Breton; we both smiled, and, of
+course, I presumed we smiled for the same reason.
+
+I happen to know, and unluckily did it happen, the very minute of
+the hour when we left Blocksby's.  It was a quarter to four
+o'clock--a church-tower was chiming the three-quarters in the
+Strand, and I looked half mechanically at my own watch, which was
+five minutes fast.  On Sunday I went down to Oxford, and happened
+to walk into Allen's rooms.  He was lying on a sofa reading the
+"Spectator."  After chatting a little, I said, "You took no notice
+of me, nor of the Bretons yesterday, Allen, at Blocksby's."
+
+"I didn't see you," he said; and as he was speaking there came a
+knock at the door.
+
+"Come in!" cried Allen, and a man entered who was a stranger to me.
+You would not have called him a gentleman perhaps.  However, I
+admit that I am possibly no great judge of a gentleman.
+
+Allen looked up.
+
+"Hullo, Mr. Thomas," he said, "have you come up to see Mr. Mortby?"
+mentioning a well-known Oxford bibliophile.  "Wharton," he went on,
+addressing me, "this is Mr. Thomas from Blocksby's."  I bowed.  Mr.
+Thomas seemed embarrassed.  "Can I have a word alone with you,
+sir?" he murmured to Allen.
+
+"Certainly," answered Allen, looking rather surprised.  "You'll
+excuse me a moment, Wharton," he said to me.  "Stop and lunch,
+won't you?  There's the old "Spectator" for you;" and he led Mr.
+Thomas into a small den where he used to hear his pupils read their
+essays, and so forth.
+
+In a few minutes he came out, looking rather pale, and took an
+embarrassed farewell of Mr. Thomas.
+
+"Look here, Wharton," he said to me, "here is a curious business.
+That fellow from Blocksby's tells me that the Longepierre
+Theocritus disappeared yesterday afternoon; that I was the last
+person in whose hand it was seen, and that not only the man who
+always attends in the room but Lord Tarras and Mr. Wentworth, saw
+it in MY hands just before it was missed."
+
+"What a nuisance!" I answered.  "You were looking at it when Miss
+Breton and I saw you, and you didn't notice us; Does Thomas know
+WHEN--I mean about what o'clock--the book was first missed?"
+
+"That's the lucky part of the whole worry," said Allen.  "I left
+the rooms at three exactly, and it was missed about ten minutes to
+four; dozens of people must have handled it in that interval of
+time.  So interesting a book!"
+
+"But," I said, and paused--"are you sure your watch was right?"
+
+"Quite certain; besides, I looked at a church clock.  Why on earth
+do you ask?"
+
+"Because--I am awfully sorry--there is some unlucky muddle; but it
+was exactly a quarter, or perhaps seventeen minutes, to four when
+both Miss Breton and I saw you absorbed in the Longepierre."
+
+"Oh, it's quite IMPOSSIBLE," Allen answered; "I was far enough away
+from Blocksby's at a quarter to four."
+
+"That's all right," I said.  "Of course you can prove that; if it
+is necessary; though I dare say the book has fallen behind a row of
+others, and has been found by this time.  Where were you at a
+quarter to four?"
+
+"I really don't feel obliged to stand a cross-examination before my
+time," answered Allen, flushing a little.  Then I remembered that I
+was engaged to lunch at All Souls', which was true enough;
+convenient too, for I do not quite see how the conversation could
+have been carried on pleasantly much further.  For I HAD seen him--
+not a doubt about it.  But there was one curious thing.  Next time
+I met Miss Breton I told her the story, and said, "You remember how
+we saw Allen, at Blocksby's, just as we were going away?"
+
+"No," she said, "I did not see him; where was he?"
+
+"Then why did you smile--don't you remember?  I looked at him and
+at you, and I thought you smiled!"
+
+"Because--well, I suppose because YOU smiled," she said.  And the
+subject of the conversation was changed.
+
+It was an excessively awkward affair.  It did not come "before the
+public," except, of course, in the agreeably mythical gossip of an
+evening paper.  There was no more public scandal than that.  Allen
+was merely ruined.  The matter was introduced to the notice of the
+Wardens and the other Fellows of St. Jude's.  What Lord Tarras saw,
+what Mr. Wentworth saw, what I saw, clearly proved that Allen was
+in the auction-rooms, and had the confounded book in his hand, at
+an hour when, as HE asserted, he had left the place for some time.
+It was admitted by one of the people employed at the sale-rooms
+that Allen had been noticed (he was well known there) leaving the
+house at three.  But he must have come back again, of course, as at
+least four people could have sworn to his presence in the show-room
+at a quarter to four o'clock.  When he was asked in a private
+interview, by the Head of his College, to say where he went after
+leaving Blocksby's Allen refused to answer.  He merely said that he
+could not prove the facts; that his own word would not be taken
+against that of so many unprejudiced and even friendly witnesses.
+He simply threw up the game.  He resigned his fellowship; he took
+his name off the books; he disappeared.
+
+There was a good deal of talk; people spoke about the
+unscrupulousness of collectors, and repeated old anecdotes on that
+subject.  Then the business was forgotten.  Next, in a year's time
+or so, the book--the confounded Longepierre's Theocritus--was found
+in a pawnbroker's shop.  The history of its adventures was traced
+beyond a shadow of doubt.  It had been very adroitly stolen, and
+disposed of, by a notorious book-thief, a gentleman by birth--now
+dead, but well remembered.  Ask Mr. Quaritch!
+
+Allen's absolute innocence was thus demonstrated beyond cavil,
+though nobody paid any particular attention to the demonstration.
+As for Allen, he had vanished; he was heard of no more.
+
+He was HERE; dying here, beside the black wave of lone Loch Nan.
+
+All this, so long in the telling, I had time enough to think over,
+as I sat and watched him, and wiped his lips with water from the
+burn, clearer and sweeter than the water of the loch.
+
+At last his fit of coughing ceased, and a kind of peace came into
+his face.
+
+"Allen, my dear old boy," I said--I don't often use the language of
+affection--"did you never hear that all that stupid story was
+cleared up; that everyone knows you are innocent?"
+
+He only shook his head; he did not dare to speak, but he looked
+happier, and he put his hand in mine.
+
+I sat holding his hand, stroking it.  I don't know how long I sat
+there; I had put my coat and waterproof under him.  He was "wet
+through," of course; there was little use in what I did.  What
+could I do with him? how bring him to a warm and dry place?
+
+The idea seemed to strike him, for he half rose and pointed to the
+little burnside, across the loch.  A plan occurred to me; I tore a
+leaf from my sketch-book, put the paper with pencil in his hand,
+and said, "Where do you live?  Don't speak.  Write."
+
+He wrote in a faint scrawl, "Help me to that burnside.  Then I can
+guide you."
+
+I hardly know how I got him there, for, light as he was, I am no
+Hercules.  However, with many a rest, we reached the little dell;
+and then I carried him up its green side, and laid him on the
+heather of the moor.
+
+He wrote again:
+
+"Go to that clump of rushes--the third from the little hillock.
+Then look, but be careful.  Then lift the big grass tussock."
+
+The spot which Allen indicated was on the side of a rather steep
+grassy slope.  I approached it, dragged at the tussock of grass,
+which came away easily enough, and revealed the entrance to no more
+romantic hiding-place than an old secret whiskey "still."  Private
+stills, not uncommon in Sutherland and some other northern shires,
+are extinct in Galloway.  Allen had probably found this one by
+accident in his wanderings, and in his half-insane bitterness
+against mankind had made it, for some time at least, his home.  The
+smoke-blackened walls, the recesses where the worm-tub and the
+still now stood, all plainly enough betrayed the original user of
+the hiding-place.  There was a low bedstead, a shelf or two,
+whereon lay a few books--a Shakespeare, a Homer, a Walton,
+Plutarch's "Lives"; very little else out of a library once so rich.
+There was a tub of oatmeal, a heap of dry peat, two or three eggs
+in a plate, some bottles, a keg of whiskey, some sardine-tins, a
+box with clothes--that was nearly all the "plenishing" of this
+hermitage.  It was never likely to be discovered, except by the
+smoke, when the inmate lit a fire.  The local shepherd knew it, of
+course, but Allen had bought his silence, not that there were many
+neighbours for the shepherd to tattle with.
+
+Allen had recovered strength enough by this time to reach his den
+with little assistance.  He made me beat up the white of one of the
+eggs with a little turpentine, which was probably, under the
+circumstances, the best styptic for his malady within his reach.  I
+lit his fire of peats, undressed him, put him to bed, and made him
+as comfortable as might be in the den which he had chosen.  Then I
+went back to the shepherd's, sent a messenger to the nearest
+doctor, and procured a kind of sledge, generally used for dragging
+peat home, wherein, with abundance of blankets for covering, I
+hoped to bring Allen back to the shepherd's cottage.
+
+Not to delay over details, this was managed at last, and the
+unhappy fellow was under a substantial roof.  But he was very ill;
+he became delirious and raved of many things--talked of old college
+adventures, bid recklessly for imaginary books, and practised other
+eccentricities of fever.
+
+When his fever left him he was able to converse in a way--I
+talking, and he scrawling faintly with a pencil on paper.  I told
+him how his character had been cleared, how he had been hunted for,
+advertised for, vainly enough.  To the shepherds' cottages where he
+had lived till the beginning of that summer, newspapers rarely
+came; to his den in the old secret still, of course they never came
+at all.
+
+His own story of what he had been doing at the fatal hour when so
+many people saw him at the auction-rooms was brief.  He had left
+the rooms, as he said, at three o'clock, pondering how he might
+raise money for the book on which his heart was set.  His feet had
+taken him, half unconsciously, to
+
+
+a dismal court,
+Place of Israelite resort,
+
+
+where dwelt and dealt one Isaacs, from whom he had, at various
+times, borrowed money on usury.  The name of Isaacs was over a
+bell, one of many at the door, and, when the bell was rung, the
+street door "opened of his own accord," like that of the little
+tobacco-and-talk club which used to exist in an alley off Pall
+Mall.  Allen rang the bell, the outer door opened, and, as he was
+standing at the door of Isaacs' chambers, before he had knocked,
+THAT portal also opened, and the office-boy, a young Jew, slunk
+cautiously out.  On seeing Allen, he had seemed at once surprised
+and alarmed.  Allen asked if his master was in; the lad answered
+"No" in a hesitating way; but on second thoughts, averred that
+Isaacs "would be back immediately," and requested Allen to go in
+and wait.  He did so, but Isaacs never came, and Allen fell asleep.
+He had a very distinct and singular dream, he said, of being in
+Messrs. Blocksy's rooms, of handling the Longepierre, and of seeing
+Wentworth there, and Lord Tarras.  When he wakened he was very
+cold, and, of course, it was pitch dark.  He did not remember where
+he was; he lit a match and a candle on the chimney-piece.  Then
+slowly his memory came back to him, and not only his memory, but
+his consciousness of what he had wholly forgotten--namely, that
+this was Saturday, the Sabbath of the Jews, and that there was not
+the faintest chance of Isaacs' arrival at his place of business.
+In the same moment the embarrassment and confusion of the young
+Israelite flashed vividly across his mind, and he saw that he was
+in a very awkward position.  If that fair Hebrew boy had been
+robbing, or trying to rob, the till, then Allen's position was
+serious indeed, as here he was, alone, at an untimely hour, in the
+office.  So he blew the candle out, and went down the dingy stairs
+as quietly as possible, took the first cab he met, drove to
+Paddington, and went up to Oxford.
+
+It is probable that the young child of Israel, if he had been
+attempting any mischief, did not succeed in it.  Had there been any
+trouble, it is likely enough that he would have involved Allen in
+the grief.  Then Allen would have been in a, perhaps, unprecedented
+position.  He could have established an alibi, as far as the Jew's
+affairs went, by proving that he had been at Blocksby's at the hour
+when the boy would truthfully have sworn that he had let him into
+Isaacs' chambers.  And, as far as the charge against him at
+Blocksby's went, the evidence of the young Jew would have gone to
+prove that he was at Isaacs', where he had no business to be, when
+we saw him at Blocksby's.  But, unhappily, each alibi would have
+been almost equally compromising.  The difficulty never arose, but
+the reason why Allen refused to give any account of what he had
+been doing, and where he had been, at four o'clock on that Saturday
+afternoon--a refusal that told so heavily against him--is now
+sufficiently clear.  His statement would, we may believe, never
+have been corroborated by the youthful Hebrew, who certainly had
+his own excellent reasons for silence, and who probably had
+carefully established an alibi of his own elsewhere.
+
+The true account of Allen's appearance, or apparition, at
+Blocksby's, when I and Tarras, Wentworth and the attendant
+recognised him, and Miss Breton did NOT, is thus part of the
+History of the Unexplained.  Allen might have appealed to
+precedents in the annals of the Psychical Society, where they exist
+in scores, and are technically styled "collective hallucinations."
+But neither a jury, nor a judge, perhaps, would accept the
+testimony of experts in Psychical Research if offered in a criminal
+trial, nor acquit a wraith.
+
+Possibly this scepticism has never yet injured the cause of an
+innocent man.  Yet I know, in my own personal experience, and have
+heard from others, from men of age, sagacity, and acquaintance with
+the greatest affairs, instances in which people have been
+distinctly seen by sane, healthy, and honourable witnesses, in
+places and circumstances where it was (as we say) "physically
+impossible" that they should have been, and where they certainly
+were not themselves aware of having been.  That is why human
+testimony seems to me to establish no more, in certain
+circumstances, than a highly probable working hypothesis--a
+hypothesis on which, of course, we are bound to act.
+
+There is little more to tell.  By dint of careful nursing, poor
+Allen was enabled to travel; he reached Mentone, and there the
+mistral ended him.  He was a lonely man, with no kinsfolk; his
+character was cleared among the people who knew him best; the
+others have forgotten him.  Nobody can be injured by this
+explanation of his silence when called on to prove his innocence,
+and of his unusually successful vanishing from a society which had
+never tried very hard to discover him in his retreat.  He has lived
+and suffered and died, and left behind him little but an incident
+in the History of the Unexplained.
+
+
+
+THE COMPLETE BUNGLER
+
+
+
+SCENE I.--HAMPSHIRE
+
+PISCATOR ANGLUS.  PISCATOR SCOTUS
+
+Scotus.--Well, now let's go to your sport of angling.  Where,
+Master, is your river?
+
+Anglus.--Marry, 'tis here; mark you, this is the famous Test.
+
+Scotus.--What, Master, this dry ditch?  There be scarce three
+inches of water in it.
+
+Anglus.--Patience, Scholar, the water is in the meadows, or Master
+Oakley, the miller, is holding it up.  Nay, let us wait here some
+hour or so till the water is turned on.  Or perchance, Scholar, for
+the matter of five shillings, Master Oakley will even raise his
+hatches, an you have a crown about you.
+
+Scotus.--I like not to part with my substance, but, as needs must,
+here, Master, is the coin.
+
+[Exit ANGLUS to the Mill.  He returns.
+
+Anglus.--Now, Scholar, said I not so?  The water is turned on
+again, and, lo you, at the tail of yonder stream, a fair trout is
+rising.  You shall see a touch of our craft.
+
+[ANGLUS crawls on his belly into a tuft of nettles, where he kneels
+and flicks his fly for about ten minutes.
+
+Anglus.--Alas, he has ceased rising, and I am grievously entangled
+in these nettles.  Come, Scholar, but warily, lest ye fright my
+fish, and now, disentangle my hook.
+
+Scotus.--Here is your hook, but, marry, my fingers tingle shrewdly
+with the nettles; also I marked the fish hasting up stream.
+
+Anglus.--Nay, come, we shall even look for another.
+
+Scotus.--Oh, Master, what is this?  That which but now was dry
+ditch is presently salad bowl!  Mark you how the green vegetables
+cover the waters!  We shall have no sport.
+
+Anglus.--Patience, Scholar; 'tis but Master Hedgely's men, cutting
+the weeds above.  We may rest us some hour or two, till they go by.
+Or, perchance, for a matter of five shillings -
+
+Scotus.--Nay, Master, this English angling is over costly.  The
+rent of your ditch is high, the expenses of travel are burdensome.
+In crawling through your nettles and thistles I have scratched my
+face, and torn my raiment, and I will not pay the labourer to cease
+labouring in his industry.
+
+Anglus.--Why then, pazienza, Scholar, or listen while I sing that
+sweet ditty of country contentment and an angler's life, writ by
+worthy Master Hackle long ago.
+
+SONG
+
+The Angler hath a jolly life
+Who by the rail runs down,
+And leaves his business and his wife,
+And all the din of town.
+The wind down stream is blowing straight,
+And nowhere cast can he;
+Then lo, he doth but sit and wait
+In kindly company.
+
+Or else men turn the water off,
+Or folk be cutting weed,
+While he doth at misfortune scoff,
+From every trouble freed.
+Or else he waiteth for a rise,
+And ne'er a rise may see;
+For why, there are not any flies
+To bear him company.
+
+Or, if he mark a rising trout,
+He straightway is caught up,
+And then he takes his flasket out,
+And drinks a rousing cup.
+Or if a trout he chance to hook,
+Weeded and broke is he,
+And then be finds a goodly book
+Instructive company.
+
+
+What think you of my song, Scholar?  'Tis choicely musical.  What,
+he is gone!  A pest on those Northerners; they have no manners.
+Now, methinks I do remember a trout called George, a heavy fellow
+that lies ever under the arch of yonder bridge, where there is
+shelter from the wind.  Ho for George!
+
+[Exit singing.
+
+
+SCENE II.--A BRIDGE
+
+
+Enter ANGLUS
+
+Anglus.--Now to creep like your Indian of Virginia on the prey, and
+angle for George.  I'faith, he is a lusty trout; many a good
+Wickham have I lost in George.
+
+[He ensconces himself in the middle of a thorn bush.
+
+Anglus.--There he is, I mark his big back fin.  Now speed me, St.
+Peter, patron of all honest anglers!  But first to dry my fly!
+
+[He flicks his fly for ten minutes.  Enter BOY on Bridge.  ANGLUS
+makes his cast, too short.  BOY heaves a great stone from the
+Bridge.  Exit GEORGE.  Exit BOY.
+
+Anglus.--Oh, Mass! verily the angler had need of patience!  Yonder
+boy hath spoiled my sport, and were it not that swearing frights
+the fish, I could find it in my heart to say an oath or twain.
+But, ha, here come the swallows, hawking low on the stream.  Now,
+were but my Scholar here, I could impart to him much honest lore
+concerning the swallow, and other birds.  But where she hawks,
+there fly must be, and fish will rise, and, look you, I do mark the
+trout feeding in yonder ford below the plank bridge.
+
+[ANGLUS steals off, and gingerly takes up his position.
+
+Anglus.--Marry, that is a good trout under the burdock!
+
+[He is caught up in the burdock, and breaks his tackle.
+
+Anglus.--Now to knot a fresh cast.  Marry, but they are feeding
+gaily!  How kindly is the angler's life; he harmeth no fish that
+swims, yet the Spectator deemeth ours a cruel sport.  Ah, good
+Master Townsend and learned Master Hutton, little ye wot of our
+country contents.  So, I am ready again, and this Whitchurch dun
+will beguile yonder fish, I doubt not.  Marry, how thick the flies
+come, and how the fish do revel in this merciful provender that
+Heaven sendeth!  Verily I know not at which of these great fellows
+to make my essay.
+
+[Enter twenty-four callow young ducks, swimming up stream.  The
+ducks chevy the flies, taking them out of the very mouths of the
+trout.
+
+Anglus.--Oh, mercy.  I have hooked a young duck!  Where is my
+landing-net?  Nay, I have left it under yonder elm!
+
+[He struggles with the young duck.  By the conclusion of the fray
+the Rise is over.
+
+Anglus.--I have saved my fly, but lo, the trout have ceased to
+feed, and will rise no more till after sunset.  Well, "a merry
+heart goes all the way!"  And lo, here comes my Scholar.  Ho,
+runaway, how have you sped?
+
+Scotus.--Not ill.  Here be my spoils, great ones; but how faint-
+hearted are your southern trout!
+
+Anglus.--That fat fellow is a good three pounds by the scales.
+But, Scholar, with what fly caught ye these, and where?
+
+Scotus.--Marry, Master, in a Mill-tail, where the water lagged not,
+but ran free as it doth in bonny Scotland; nor with no fly did I
+grip him, but with an artificial penk, or minnow.  It was made by a
+handsome woman that had a fine hand, and wrought for Master Brown,
+of Aberdeen.  The mould, or body of the minnow, is of parchment,
+methinks, and he hath fins of copper, all so curiously dissembled
+that it will beguile any sharp-sighted trout in a swift stream.
+Men call it a Phantom, Master; wilt thou not try my Phantom?
+
+Anglus.--Begone, sirrah.  I took thee for an angler, and thou art
+but a poaching knave!
+
+Scotus.--Knave thyself!  I will break thy head!
+
+Anglus.--Softly, Scholar.  Here comes good Master Hedgely, who will
+see fair play.  Now lie there, my coat, and have at you!
+
+[They fight, SCOTUS is knocked down.
+
+Anglus.--Half-minute time!  Time is up!  Master Hedgely, in my dry
+fly box thou wilt find a little sponge for moistening of my casting
+lines.  Wilt thou, of thy courtesy, throw it up for my Scholar?
+And now, Scholar, trust me, thy guard is too low.  I hope thou
+bearest no malice.
+
+Scotus.--None, Master.  But, lo!  I am an hungered; wilt thou taste
+my cates?  Here I have bread slices and marmalade of Dundee.  This
+fishing is marvellous hungry work.
+
+Anglus.--Gladly will I fall to, but first say me a grace--
+Benedictus benedicat!  Where is thine usquebaugh?  Marry, 'tis the
+right Talisker!
+
+Scotus.--And now, Master, wherefore wert thou wroth with me?  Came
+we not forth to catch fish?
+
+Anglus.--Nay, marry, Scholar, by no means to catch fish, but to
+fish with the dry fly.  Now this, humanly speaking, is impossible;
+natheless it is rare sport.  But for your fish, as they were ill
+come by, let us even give them to good Master Hedgely here, and so
+be merry till the sedges come on in the late twilight.  And, trust
+me, this is the rarest fishing, and the peacefulest; only see that
+thou fish not with the wet fly, for that is Anathema.  So shall we
+have light consciences.
+
+Scotus.--And light baskets!
+
+Anglus.--Ay, it may be so.
+
+
+
+Footnotes:
+
+{1}  Too true, alas!
+
+{2}  It should be added that large trout, up to six pounds, are
+sometimes taken.  One boatman assured me that he had caught two
+three-pounders at one cast.
+
+{3}  From motives of delicacy I suppress the true name of the
+river.
+
+{4}  After this paper was in print, an angler was actually drowned
+while engaged in playing a salmon.  This unfortunate circumstance
+followed, and did not suggest the composition of the story.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of The Project Gutenberg Etext of Angling Sketches, by Andrew Lang
+
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