certainty of laborious disappointment, keep us from the
waterside when April comes.

Next to being an expert, it is well to be a contented duffer: a man who
would fish if he could, and who will pleasure himself by flicking off his
flies, and dreaming of impossible trout, and smoking among the sedges
Hope's enchanted cigarettes. Next time we shall be more skilled, more
fortunate. Next time! "To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow." Grey
hairs come, and stiff limbs, and shortened sight; but the spring is green
and hope is fresh for all the changes in the world and in ourselves. We
can tell a hawk from a hand-saw, a March Brown from a Blue Dun; and if
our success be as poor as ever, our fancy can dream as well as ever of
better things and more fortunate chances. For fishing is like life; and
in the art of living, too, there are duffers, though they seldom give us
their confessions. Yet even they are kept alive, like the incompetent
angler, by this undying hope: they will be more careful, more skilful,
more lucky next time. The gleaming untravelled future, the bright
untried waters, allure us from day to day, from pool to pool, till, like
the veteran on Coquet side, we "try a farewell throw," or, like Stoddart,
look our last on Tweed.

A BORDER BOYHOOD

A fisher, says our father Izaak, is like a poet: he "must be born so."
The majority of dwellers on the Border are born to be fishers, thanks to
the endless number of rivers and burns in the region between the Tweed
and the Coquet--a realm where almost all trout-fishing is open, and
where, since population and love of the sport have increased, there is
now but little water that merits the trouble of putting up a rod.

Like the rest of us in that country, I was born an angler, though under
an evil star, for, indeed, my labours have not been blessed, and are
devoted to fishing rather than to the catching of fish. Remembrance can
scarcely recover, "nor time bring back to time," the days when I was not
busy at the waterside; yet the feat is not quite beyond the power of
Mnemosyne. My first recollection of the sport must date from about the
age of four. I recall, in a dim brightness, driving along a road that
ran between banks of bracken and mica-veined rocks, and the sunlight on a
shining bend of a highland stream, and my father, standing in the shallow
water, showing me a huge yellow fish, that gave its last fling or two on
the grassy bank. The fish seem