more cunning than of old. Then, if they
were feeding, they took the artificial fly freely; now it must be exactly
of the right size and shade or they will have none of it. They come
provokingly short, too; just plucking at the hook, and running out a foot
of line or so, then taking their departure. For some reason the Tweed is
more difficult to fish with the dry fly than--the Test, for example. The
water is swifter and very dark, it drowns the fly soon, and on the
surface the fly is less easily distinguished than at Whitchurch, in the
pellucid streams. The Leader a tributary, may be fished with dry fly; on
the Tweed one can hardly manage it. There is a plan by which rising
trout may be taken--namely, by baiting with a small red worm and casting
as in fly-fishing. But that is so hard on the worm! Probably he who can
catch trout with fly on the Tweed between Melrose and Holy Lee can catch
them anywhere. On a good day in April great baskets are still made in
preserved parts of the Tweed, but, if they are made in open water, it
must be, I fancy, with worm, or with the "screw," the lava of the May-
fly. The screw is a hideous and venomous-looking animal, which is fixed
on a particular kind of tackle, and cast up stream with a short line. The
heaviest trout are fond of it, but it can only be used at a season when
either school or Oxford keeps one far from what old Franck, Walton's
contemporary, a Cromwellian trooper, calls "the glittering and resolute
streams of Tweed."

Difficult as it is, that river is so beautiful and alluring that it
scarcely needs the attractions of sport. The step banks, beautifully
wooded, and in spring one mass of primroses, are crowned here and there
with ruined Border towers--like Elibank, the houses of Muckle Mou'ed Meg;
or with fair baronial houses like Fernilea. Meg made a bad exchange when
she left Elibank with the salmon pool at its foot for bleak Harden,
frowning over the narrow "den" where Harden kept the plundered cattle.
There is no fishing in the tiny Harden burn, that joins the brawling
Borthwick Water.

The burns of the Lowlands are now almost barren of trout. The spawning
fish, flabby and useless, are killed in winter. All through the rest of
the year, in the remotest places, tourists are hard at them with worm. In
a small burn a skilled wormer may almost depopulate the pools, and, on
the Border, all is fish that comes to the hook; men keep the very
fingerlings, on the