ce proves, however, that ordinary _salmo fario_, or common brook
trout, are the best for turning down; for the Loch Leven trout require
deep water to grow to any size.

When a boy, I made a strange recovery of an eel that I had hooked and
lost three weeks before. I was fishing with worms in a large deep hole
in Surrey. My hook was a salmon fly with the feathers clipped off. I
hooked what I believed to be an eel, but he broke the line through
getting it entangled in a stick on the bottom. Three weeks afterwards,
when fishing in the same fashion and in the same place, the line got
fixed up on the bottom. I pulled hard and a stick came away. On that
stick, strange to say, was entangled my old gut casting-line, and at the
end of the line was an eel of two pounds' weight! On cutting him open,
there, sure enough, was the identical clipped salmon fly; it had been
inside that eel for three weeks without hurting him. This sounds like a
regular angler's yarn, and nobody need believe it unless he likes;
nevertheless, it is perfectly true. I had got "fixed up" in the same
stick that had broken my line on the previous occasion.

That fish have very little sense of feeling is proved time after time.
There is nothing unusual in catching a jack with several old hooks in
his mouth. With trout, however, the occurrence is more rare. Last season
my brother lost a fly and two yards of gut through a big trout breaking
his tackle, but two minutes afterwards he caught the fish and recovered
his fly and his tackle. We constantly catch fish during the may-fly time
with broken tackle in their mouths.

Who does not recollect the rapturous excitement caused by the first fish
caught in early youth? My first capture will ever remain firmly
impressed on the tablet of the brain, for it was a red herring--"a
common or garden," prime, thoroughly salted "red herring"! It came about
in this way. At the age of nine I was taken by my father on a yachting
expedition round the lovely islands of the west coast of Scotland. We
were at anchor the first evening of the voyage in one of the beautiful
harbours of the Hebrides, and, noticing the sailors fishing over the
side of the boat, I begged to be allowed to hold the line. Somehow or
other they managed to get a "red herring" on to the hook when my
attention was diverted; so that when I hauled up a fish that in the
darkness looked fairly silvery my excitement knew no bounds. After the
sailors had taken it off th