t was well, perhaps, that he lived in days when
water-bailiffs were neither so numerous, nor so strict in the execution
of their duties, as they now are, for nothing could cure him of the
habit, when he saw a fish struggling up a shallow stream, of dashing in,
seizing that salmon in his teeth, and laying it at the feet of his
embarrassed master, who, far from being connected with the poaching
fraternity, was, indeed, a magistrate, to whom the gift of a salmon in
such circumstances brought only confusion.

After all, is there not generally a something lovable in the man who
poaches purely for _sport's_ sake? Who can fail to mourn the end of
poor, harmless, gallant, drucken Jocky B----, who gave his life for his
love of what he conceived to be sport? "Here's daith or glory for
Jocky," he cried, when the watchers surrounded him, leaving but the one
possibility of escape. And in that swollen, wintry torrent into which he
plunged, the Bailiff Death laid hands on Jocky. Perhaps even now in the
shades below, his "ghost may land the ghosts of fish"; mayhap, with a
cleek such as that to which his cold fingers yet stiffly clung when they
found him in the deep pool, he may still, now and again, be permitted
with joyous heart to lift from the waters that ripple through Hades
spectral fish of fabulous dimensions.

Salmon do not now appear to be so numerous in Tweed as apparently they
were eighty or a hundred years ago; it is said that in 1824, when the
nets had been off the lower reaches of the river for the Sunday,
sometimes as many as five hundred salmon and grilse would be taken at
Kelso of a Monday morning by the net and coble. It is a prodigious haul
of fish. One's mouth, too, waters as one reads of the numbers that were
in those days taken in most stretches of the river by rod and
line--though probably a goodly number of them were kelts.

Yet, even now, if in the month of November, when waters are red and
swollen, one stands by Selkirk cauld, the fish may be seen in numbers
almost incredible. By scores at a time you may see them, great and
small, hurl themselves into the air over the great wave which boils at
the cauld-foot. And the bigger fish, landing--if one may use the
term--far beyond the first upheaval of the wave, will rush stoutly up
the swirling, foaming rapid, perhaps half-way to the smooth water above
the cauld, ere they are swept back, still valiantly struggling, into the
seething pool below. The smaller fish les