! we shall find him presently. He has been away at the
mill-heads and carriers; what the General would call outpost duty.

[SCENE: Road in front of mill. Music of droning and dripping wheel.
Bats wheeling overhead. Mother in cottage singing child to sleep.
Dogs barking in distance. Sack-laden wagon rumbling over bridge.
Doctor seated on a cask smoking, and pulling the ears of a setter.
Gleam of fading light on quiet, mirror-like water. Corncrake heard
near. Nightingales in concert in adjacent park. Scent of May-bloom
heavy in the air.]

R. O. (on box of wagonette with tired fishermen behind): Well, Doctor,
what have you done?

DOCTOR (youthful and of goodly countenance): Six brace.

PARSON: You mean fish--not brace.

DOCTOR (shrugging his shoulders): What time did the Mayfly come up?
Three or thereabouts, did it? That is just about the time I came in to
have a nap, and I have not fished since. I told you not to idle about
waiting for Mayfly. Here are my trout, and I got every one of them
with the small fly--Welshman's button--before one o'clock.

The GENERAL: They run small.

DOCTOR: H'm, perhaps they do. Two of them seem to have rather bad
teeth, too. Still, I don't grumble. Ah, well; good-night. (Wagonette
rumbles off down the dusty road.)

R. O.: Good chap, that. He always sleeps at the mill; says the wheel
grinds him to sleep. (Later, at the porch of the Black Bull.) We
shall have the great rise very likely to-morrow; but I really do think
there's something in that small-fly business.

TERLAN: Not forgetting my mainmast.

GEORGY: And, while you are about it, my fads and fanglements.

CHAPTER IV

MY FIRST TWEED SALMON

It may, I trust, be forgiven me if, when thinking of all the salmon I
have taken in half a century of attempts and hopes for that 70-pounder
which is ever lying expectant in the angler's imagination, I catch my
first Tweed salmon over again. A good deal of water must have run
through Kelso Bridge since, for I had better confess it was in the
month of October, 1889. In that year the autumn fishing in all
Scotland on the rivers that remained open during the month was
decidedly capricious. This was one of those expeditions when it is
wise to make the most of the tiniest opportunities of amusement, and I
began very fairly with a fellow-passenger in the train, one of the
class which, seeing your fishing things amongst the baggage, arrogates
to itself the right to o