d to be on sale in the village.
Their presence in the water may perhaps be accounted for thus: they may
have come into the loch from the river, by way of the tiny feeder; but
the river-trout are both scarce and small. A new farmer had given up
letting the water off, and probably there must have been very rich
feeding, water-shrimps or snails, which might partly account for the
refusal to rise at the artificial fly. Or they may have been ottered by
the villagers, though that would rather have made them rise short than
not rise at all.

There is another loch on an extremely remote hillside, eight miles from
the smallest town, in a pastoral country. There are trout enough in the
loch, and of excellent size and flavour, but you scarcely ever get them.
They rise freely, but they _always_ rise short. It is, I think, the most
provoking loch I ever fished. You raise them; they come up freely,
showing broad sides of a ruddy gold, like the handsomest Test trout, but
they almost invariably miss the hook. You do not land one out of twenty.
The reason is, apparently, that people from the nearest town use the
otter in the summer evenings, when these trout rise best. In a
Sutherland loch, Mr. Edward Moss tells us (in "A Season in Sutherland"),
that he once found an elegant otter, a well-made engine of some
unscrupulous tourist, lying in the bottom of the water on a sunny day. At
Loch Skene, on the top of a hill, twenty miles from any town, otters are
occasionally found by the keeper or the shepherds, concealed near the
shore. The practice of ottering can give little pleasure to any but a
depraved mind, and nothing educates trout so rapidly into "rising short";
why they are not to be had when they are rising most vehemently, "to
themselves," is another mystery. A few rises are encouraging, but when
the water is all splashing with rises, as a rule the angler is only
tantalised. A windy day, a day with a large ripple, but without white
waves breaking, is, as a rule, best for a loch. In some lochs the sea-
trout prefer such a hurricane that a boat can hardly be kept on the
water. I have known a strong north wind in autumn put down the
sea-trout, whereas the salmon rose, with unusual eagerness, just in the
shallows where the waves broke in foam on the shore. The best day I ever
had with sea-trout was muggy and grey, and the fish were most eager when
the water was still, except for a tremendously heavy shower of rain, "a
singi