ude: there are no tourists nor
anglers here, and the life of the birds is especially free and charming.
The trout, too, are large, pink of flesh, and game of character; but the
world of mankind need not rush thither. They are not to be captured by
the wiles of men, or so rarely that the most enthusiastic anglers have
given them up. They are as safe in their tarn as those enchanted fish of
the "Arabian Nights." Perhaps a silver sedge in a warm twilight may
somewhat avail, but the adventure is rarely achieved.

These are the waters with which our boyhood was mainly engaged; it is a
pleasure to name and number them. Memory, that has lost so much and
would gladly lose so much more, brings vividly back the golden summer
evenings by Tweedside, when the trout began to plash in the
stillness--brings back the long, lounging, solitary days beneath the
woods of Ashiesteil--days so lonely that they sometimes, in the end,
begat a superstitious eeriness. One seemed forsaken in an enchanted
world; one might see the two white fairy deer flit by, bringing to us, as
to Thomas Rhymer, the tidings that we must back to Fairyland. Other
waters we knew well, and loved: the little salmon-stream in the west that
doubles through the loch, and runs a mile or twain beneath its alders,
past its old Celtic battle-field, beneath the ruined shell of its feudal
tower, to the sea. Many a happy day we had there, on loch or stream,
with the big sea-trout which have somehow changed their tastes, and to-
day take quite different flies from the green body and the red body that
led them to the landing-net long ago. Dear are the twin Alines, but
dearer is Tweed, and Ettrick, where our ancestor was drowned in a flood,
and his white horse was found, next day, feeding near his dead body, on a
little grassy island. There is a great pleasure in trying new methods,
in labouring after the delicate art of the dry fly-fisher in the clear
Hampshire streams, where the glassy tide flows over the waving tresses of
crow's-foot below the poplar shade. But nothing can be so good as what
is old, and, as far as angling goes, is practically ruined, the alternate
pool and stream of the Border waters, where

The triple pride
Of Eildon looks over Strathclyde,

and the salmon cast murmurs hard by the Wizard's grave. They are all
gone now, the old allies and tutors in the angler's art--the kind
gardener who baited our hooks; the good Scotch judge who gave us