As they gleam in the rays of the sun.

But where are the speed and the spray--
The dark lakes that welter them forth,
Tree and heath nodding over their way--
The rock and the precipice grey,
That bind the wild streams of the North?

Well, both, are good, the streams of north and south, but he who has
given his heart to the Tweed, as did Tyro, in Homer, to the Enipeus will
never change his love.

P.S.--That Galloway fly--"The Butcher and Lang"--has been avenged. A
copy of him, on the line of a friend, has proved deadly on the Tweed,
killing, among other victims, a sea-trout of thirteen pounds.

THE DOUBLE ALIBI

Glen Aline is probably the loneliest place in the lone moorlands of
Western Galloway. The country is entirely pastoral, and I fancy that the
very pasture is bad enough. Stretches of deer-grass and ling, rolling
endlessly to the feet of Cairnsmure and the circle of the eastern hills,
cannot be good feeding for the least Epicurean of sheep, and sheep do not
care for the lank and sour herbage by the sides of the "lanes," as the
half-stagnant, black, deep, and weedy burns are called in this part of
the country. The scenery is not unattractive, but tourists never wander
to these wastes where no inns are, and even the angler seldom visits
them. Indeed, the fishing is not to be called good, and the "lanes,"
which "seep," as the Scotch say, through marshes and beneath low
hillsides, are not such excellent company as the garrulous and brawling
brooks of the Border or of the Highlands. As the lanes flow, however,
from far-away lochs, it happens that large trout make their way into
them--trout which, if hooked, offer a gallant resistance before they can
be hauled over the weeds that usually line the watercourses.

Partly for the sake of trying this kind of angling, partly from a
temporary distaste for the presence of men and women, partly for the
purpose of finishing a work styled "A History of the Unexplained," I once
spent a month in the solitudes of Glen Aline. I stayed at the house of a
shepherd who, though not an unintelligent man was by no means possessed
of the modern spirit. He and his brother swains had sturdily and
successfully resisted an attempt made by the schoolmaster at a village
some seven miles off to get a postal service in the glen more frequently
than once a week. A post once a week was often enough for lucky people
who did not get letters twice a year. It was no