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I had a friend once, an angler, who in winter was fond of another sport.
He liked to cast his _louis_ into the green baize pond at Monte Carlo,
and, on the whole, he was generally "broken." He seldom landed the
golden fish of the old man's dream in Theocritus. When the croupier had
gaffed all his money he would repent and say, "Now, that would have kept
me at Loch Leven for a fortnight." One used to wonder whether a
fortnight of Loch Leven was worth an afternoon of the pleasure of losing
at Monte Carlo. The loch has a name for being cockneyfied, beset by
whole fleets of competitive anglers from various angling clubs in
Scotland. That men should competitively angle shows, indeed, a great
want of true angling sentiment. To fish in a crowd is odious, to work
hard for prizes of flasks and creels and fly-books is to mistake the true
meaning of the pastime. However, in this crowded age men are so
constituted that they like to turn a contemplative exercise into a kind
of Bank Holiday. There is no use in arguing with such persons; the worst
of their pleasure is that it tends to change a Scotch loch into something
like the pond of the Welsh Harp, at Hendon. It is always good news to
read in the papers how the Dundee Walton Society had a bad day, and how
the first prize was won by Mr. Macneesh, with five trout weighing three
pounds and three quarters. Loch Leven, then, is crowded and cockneyfied
by competitions; it has also no great name for beauty of landscape. Every
one to his own taste in natural beauty, but in this respect I think Loch
Leven is better than its reputation. It is certainly more pictorial, so
to speak, than some remote moor lochs up near Cape Wrath; Forsinard in
particular, where the scenery looks like one gigantic series of brown
"baps," flat Scotch scones, all of low elevation, all precisely similar
to each other.

Loch Leven is not such a cockney place as the majority of men who have
not visited it imagine. It really is larger than the Welsh Harp at
Hendon, and the scenery, though not like that of Ben Cruachan or Ben
Mohr, excels the landscape of Middlesex. At the northern end is a small
town, grey, with some red roofs and one or two characteristic Fifeshire
church-towers, squat and strong. There are also a few factory chimneys,
which are not fair to outward view, nor appropriate by a loch-side. On
the west are ranges of distant hills, low but not uncomely. On the east
rises a beautiful