Angling Sketches | Page 7

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