I could throw a fly over the
top of the tall reeds, and then came a heavy splash, and the wretched
little broken rod nearly doubled up. "Hooray, here I am among the big
ones!" I said, and held on. It was now that I learned the nature of
Nero's diversion when he was an angler in the Lake of Darkness. The loch
really did deserve the term "grim"; the water here was black, the sky was
ashen, the long green reeds closed cold about me, and beyond them there
was trout that I could not deal with. For when he tired of running,
which was soon, he was as far away as ever. Draw him through the forest
of reeds I could not. At last I did the fatal thing. I took hold of the
line, and then, "plop," as the poet said. He was off. A young sportsman
on the bank who had joined me expressed his artless disappointment. I
cast over the confounded reeds once more. "Splash!"--the old story! I
stuck to the fish, and got him into the watery wood, and then he went
where the lost trout go. No more came on, so I floundered a yard or two
farther, and climbed into a wild-fowl's nest, a kind of platform of
matted reeds, all yellow and faded. The nest immediately sank down deep
into the water, but it stopped somewhere, and I made a cast. The black
water boiled, and the trout went straight down and sulked. I merely held
on, till at last it seemed "time for us to go," and by cautious tugging I
got him through the reedy jungle, and "gruppit him," as the Shepherd
would have said. He was simply but decently wrapped round, from snout to
tail, in very fine water-weeds, as in a garment. Moreover, he was as
black as your hat, quite unlike the comely yellow trout who live on the
gravel in Clearburn. It hardly seemed sensible to get drowned in this
gruesome kind of angling, so, leaving the Lake of Darkness, we made for
Buccleugh, passing the cleugh where the buck was ta'en. Surely it is the
deepest, the steepest, and the greenest cleugh that is shone on by the
sun! Thereby we met an angler, an ancient man in hodden grey, strolling
home from the Rankle burn. And we told him of our bad day, and asked him
concerning that hideous fly, which had covered the loch and lured the
trout from our decent Greenwells and March browns. And the ancient man
listened to our description of the monster, and He said: "Hoot, ay; ye've
jest forgathered wi' the Bloody Doctor."

This, it appears, is the Border angler's name for the horrible insect, so
much appreciated