as near 3/4 lb. as one could guess.
As time went on it was evident that they did not flourish in the style
usual to Salmo irideus. Mr. Walton was puzzled, and, in truth, so was
Herr Jaffe. Amongst the stock planted in the principal lake there must
have been an odd fontinalis or two, and by and by these brilliant fish
were taken, of 1-lb. and 1 1/2-lb. size, freely rising at a fly. In a
word, the fontinalis seemed in a brief space to take possession and the
rainbows to decrease correspondingly. The first specimen Mr. Walton
caught he put back as a rarity, but in a year or so they were not by
any means strangers to be coddled. On the contrary they bred well, as
indeed did the rainbows. The latter, however, after five or six years
gradually deteriorated, while the fontinalis flourished and held their
own for a while. Latterly they, too, had gone the way of all
fontinalis, had become scarcer and scarcer, and it was a rare thing to
catch one where they formerly abounded.

The story of Mr. Walton's tenancy of sixteen years is thus an
interesting chapter in fish culture. That must be my excuse for
apparently labouring this matter of stocking, more especially as there
is still a curious development to unfold. It should be stated that the
lake with which we are now concerned had, previous to the introduction
of rainbows, been emptied and restocked, leaving probably a few of the
original brown trout behind. Mr. Walton thought that there were some
Loch Levens, and that these in recent years asserted themselves, and,
as he put it, "came to their own." But he went on to add that a few
years ago he had put some minnows into the lake by the chalet, and that
they had multiplied like the Hebrews of old till they literally
swarmed. As a natural consequence the trout had become bad risers, and
the growing scarcity of natural flies suggested that the minnows, by
preying upon larvae, have had a share in this decline. The trout
meanwhile had grown big and fat, as they naturally would do, fellows of
3 lb. and upwards being not uncommon. Mr. Walton fished with nothing
but the fly, and had specimens of 3 lb. to 5 lb. so taken traced on
cardboard and adorning the chalet walls, if haply they escaped the
marauders.

At his last visit, which was in the June of the fateful 1914, he killed
ten trout, which weighed exactly 10 lb., in two hours, but this was not
a common experience. His best chance of creeling one of the
three-pounder