ed as terrible and dangerous to me as to
Tobit, in the Apocrypha, did that ferocious half-pounder which he carries
on a string in the early Italian pictures. How oddly Botticelli and his
brethren misconceived the man-devouring fish, which must have been a
crocodile strayed from the Nile into the waters of the Euphrates! A half-
pounder! To have been terrified by a trout seems a bad beginning; and,
thereafter, the mist gather's over the past, only to lift again when I
see myself, with a crowd of other little children, sent to fish, with
crooked pins, for minnows, or "baggies" as we called them, in the
Ettrick. If our parents hoped that we would bring home minnows for bait,
they were disappointed. The party was under the command of a nursery
governess, and probably she was no descendant of the mother of us all,
Dame Juliana Berners. We did not catch any minnows, and I remember
sitting to watch a bigger boy, who was angling in a shoal of them when a
parr came into the shoal, and we had bright visions of alluring that
monarch of the deep. But the parr disdained our baits, and for months I
dreamed of what it would have been to capture him, and often thought of
him in church. In a moment of profane confidence my younger brother once
asked me: "What do _you_ do in sermon time? I," said he in a
whisper--"mind you don't tell--_I_ tell stories to myself about catching
trout." To which I added similar confession, for even so I drove the
sermon by, and I have not "told"--till now.

By this time we must have been introduced to trout. Who forgets his
first trout? Mine, thanks to that unlucky star, was a double deception,
or rather there were two kinds of deception. A village carpenter very
kindly made rods for us. They were of unpainted wood, these first rods;
they were in two pieces, with a real brass joint, and there was a ring at
the end of the top joint, to which the line was knotted. We were still
in the age of Walton, who clearly knew nothing, except by hearsay, of a
reel; he abandons the attempt to describe that machine as used by the
salmon-fishers. He thinks it must be seen to be understood. With these
innocent weapons, and with the gardener to bait our hooks, we were taken
to the Yarrow, far up the stream, near Ladhope. How well one remembers
deserting the gardener, and already appreciating the joys of having no
gillie nor attendant, of being "alone with ourselves and the goddess of
fishing"! I cast away a