ng shower," as George Chapman has it. On that day two rods caught
thirty-nine sea-trout, weighing forty pounds. But it is difficult to say
beforehand what day will do well, except that sunshine is bad, a north
wind worse, and no wind at all usually means an empty basket. Even to
this rule there are exceptions, and one of these is in the case of a tarn
which I shall call, pleonastically, Little Loch Beg.

This is not the real name of the loch--quite enough people know its real
name already. Nor does it seem necessary to mention the district where
the loch lies hidden; suffice it to say that a land of more streams and
scarcer trout you will hardly find. We had tried all the rivers and
burns to no purpose, and the lochs are capricious and overfished. One
loch we had not tried, Loch Beg. You walk, or drive, a few miles from
any village, then you climb a few hundred yards of hill, and from the
ridge you see, on one hand a great amphitheatre of green and purple
mountain-sides, in the west; on the east, within a hundred yards under a
slope, is Loch Beg. It is not a mile in circumference, and all but some
eighty yards of shore is defended against the angler by wide beds of
water-lilies, with their pretty white floating lamps, or by tall sedges
and reeds. Nor is the wading easy. Four steps you make with safety, at
the fifth your foremost leg sinks in mud apparently bottomless. Most
people fish only the eastern side, whereof a few score yards are open,
with a rocky and gravelly bottom.

Now, all lochs have their humours. In some trout like a big fly, in some
a small one, but almost all do best with a rough wind or rain. I knew
enough of Loch Beg to approach it at noon on a blazing day of sunshine,
when the surface was like glass. It was like that when first I saw it,
and a shepherd warned us that we "would dae naething"; we did little,
indeed, but I rose nearly every rising fish I cast over, losing them all,
too, and in some cases being broken, as I was using very fine gut, and
the fish were heavy. Another trial seemed desirable, and the number of
rising trout was most tempting. All over it trout were rising to the
natural fly, with big circles like those you see in the Test at twilight;
while in the centre, where no artificial fly can be cast for want of a
boat, a big fish would throw himself out of the water in his eagerness.
One such I saw which could not have weighed under three pounds, a short,
thick, dark-ye