er rushing about their legs on the edges of the deep
salmon-pools of the Conquhar Water. There was Cole, Radical M.P.,
impulsive and warm-hearted, a London lawyer who had declined, doubtless
to his own monetary loss, to put his sense of justice permanently into a
blue bag. There was Dr. Percival, the father of all them that cast the
angle in Glen Conquhar, who now fished little in these degenerate days,
but instead told tales of the great salmon of thirty years ago--fellows
tremendous enough to make the spick-and-span rods of these days, with
their finicking attachments, crack their joints even to think of holding
the monsters. Chiefly and finally there was "Old Royle," who came in
March, first of all the fishing clan, and lingered on till November,
when nothing but the weathered birch-leaves spun down the flooded glen
of the Conquhar. Old Royle regarded the best fishing in the water as his
birthright, and every rival as an intruder. He showed this too, for
there was no bashfulness about Old Royle. Young men who had just begun
to fish consulted him as to where they should begin on the morrow. Old
Royle was of opinion that there was not a single fish within at least
five miles of the hotel. Indeed, he thought of "taking a trap" in the
morning to a certain pool six miles up the water, where he had seen a
round half-dozen of beauties only the night before. The young men
departed, strapped and gaitered, at cock-crow on the morrow. They fished
all day, and caught nothing save and except numerous dead branches in
the narrow swirls of the linn. But they lost, in addition to their
tempers, the tops of a rod or two caught in the close birch tangles,
many casts of flies, and a fly-book which one of them had dropped out of
his breast-pocket while in act to disentangle his hook from the underlip
of a caving bank. His fly-book and he had descended into the rushing
Conquhar together. He clambered out fifty yards below; and as for the
fly-book, it was given by a mother-salmon to her young barbarians to
play with in the deepest pool between Glendona and Loch Alsh.

When these young men returned, jolly Mr. Forbes, of landlords the most
excellent, received them with a merry twinkle in his eye. In the lobby,
Old Royle was weighing his "take." He had caught two beautiful fish--one
in the pool called "Black Duncan," and the other half a mile farther up.
He had had the water to himself all day. These young men passed in to
dinner with thought