ch on a stick.

But this was not legitimate business. Not till we came to fly-fishing
were we really entered at the sport, and this initiation took place, as
it chanced, beside the very stream where I was first shown a trout. It
is a charming piece of water, amber-coloured and clear, flowing from the
Morvern hills under the limes of an ancient avenue--trees that have long
survived the house to which, of old, the road must have led. Our gillie
put on for us big bright sea-trout flies--nobody fishes there for yellow
trout; but, in our inexperience, small "brownies" were all we caught.
Probably we were only taken to streams and shallows where we could not
interfere with mature sportsmen. At all events, it was demonstrated to
us that we could actually catch fish with fly, and since then I have
scarcely touched a worm, except as a boy, in burns. In these early days
we had no notion of playing a trout. If there was a bite, we put our
strength into an answering tug, and, if nothing gave way, the trout flew
over our heads, perhaps up into a tree, perhaps over into a branch of the
stream behind us. Quite a large trout will yield to this artless method,
if the rod be sturdy--none of your glued-up cane-affairs. I remember
hooking a trout which, not answering to the first haul, ran right across
the stream and made for a hole in the opposite bank. But the second lift
proved successful and he landed on my side of the water. He had a great
minnow in his throat, and must have been a particularly greedy animal. Of
course, on this system there were many breakages, and the method was
abandoned as we lived into our teens, and began to wade and to understand
something about fly-fishing.

It was worth while to be a boy then in the south of Scotland, and to fish
the waters haunted by old legends, musical with old songs, and renowned
in the sporting essays of Christopher North and Stoddart. Even then,
thirty long years ago, the old stagers used to tell us that "the waiter
was owr sair fished," and they grumbled about the system of draining the
land, which makes a river a roaring torrent in floods, and a bed of grey
stones with a few clear pools and shallows, during the rest of the year.
In times before the hills were drained, before the manufacturing towns
were so populous, before pollution, netting, dynamiting, poisoning,
sniggling, and the enormous increase of fair and unfair fishing, the
border must have been the angler's paradi