pretext that they are "so sweet" in the frying-pan.
The crowd of anglers in glens which seem not easily accessible is
provoking enough. Into the Meggat, a stream which feeds St. Mary's Loch,
there flows the Glengaber, or Glencaber burn: the burn of the pine-tree
stump. The water runs in deep pools and streams over a blue slatey rock,
which contains gold under the sand, in the worn holes and crevices. My
friend, Mr. McAllister, the schoolmaster at St. Mary's, tells me that one
day, when fish were not rising, he scooped out the gravel of one of these
holes with his knife, and found a tiny nugget, after which the
gold-hunting fever came on him for a while. But little is got nowadays,
though in some earlier period the burn has been diverted from its bed,
and the people used solemnly to wash the sand, as in California or
Australia. Well, whether in consequence of the gold, as the alchemical
philosophers would have held, or not, the trout of the Glengaber burn
were good. They were far shorter, thicker and stronger than those of the
many neighbouring brooks. I have fished up the burn with fly, when it
was very low, hiding carefully behind the boulders, and have been
surprised at the size and gameness of the fish. As soon as the fly had
touched the brown water, it was sucked down, and there was quite a fierce
little fight before the fish came to hand.

"This, all this, was in the olden time, long ago."

The Glengaber burn is about twenty miles from any railway station, but,
on the last occasion when I visited it, three louts were worming their
way up it, within twenty yards of each other, each lout, with his huge
rod, showing himself wholly to any trout that might be left in the water.
Thirty years ago the burns that feed St. Mary's Loch were almost
unfished, and rare sport we had in them, as boys, staying at Tibbie
Sheil's famous cottage, and sleeping in her box-beds, where so often the
Ettrick Shepherd and Christopher North have lain, after copious toddy.
"'Tis gone, 'tis gone:" not in our time will any man, like the Ettrick
Shepherd, need a cart to carry the trout he has slain in Meggat Water.
That stream, flowing through a valley furnished with a grass-grown track
for a road, flows, as I said, into St. Mary's Loch. There are two or
three large pools at the foot of the loch, in which, as a small boy
hardly promoted to fly, I have seen many monsters rising greedily. Men
got into the way of fishing these pools after