fish that swims.  I would as lief catch a perch or an eel as a grayling.  This is the worst of it—this ambition of the duffer’s, this desire for perfection, as if the golfing imbecile should match himself against Mr. Horace Hutchinson, or as the sow of the Greek proverb challenged Athene to sing.  I know it all, I deplore it, I regret the evils of ambition; but c’est plus fort que moi.  If there is a trout rising well under the pendant boughs that trail in the water, if there is a brake of briars behind me, a strong wind down stream, for that trout, in that impregnable situation, I am impelled to fish.  If I raise him I strike, miss him, catch up in his tree, swish the cast off into the briars, break my top, break my heart, but—that is the humour of it.  The passion, or instinct, being in all senses blind, must no doubt be hereditary.  It is full of sorrow and bitterness and hope deferred, and entails the mockery of friends, especially of the fair.  But I would as soon lay down a love of books as a love of fishing.

Success with pen or rod may be beyond one, but there is the pleasure of the pursuit, the rapture of endeavour, the delight of an impossible chase, the joys of nature—sky, trees, brooks, and birds.  Happiness in these things is the legacy to us of the barbarian.  Man in the future will enjoy bricks, asphalte, fog, machinery, “society,” even picture galleries, as many men and most women do already.  We are fortunate who inherit the older, not “the new spirit”—we who, skilled or unskilled, follow in the steps of our father, Izaak, by streams less clear, indeed, and in meadows less fragrant, than his.  Still, they are meadows and streams, not wholly dispeopled yet of birds and trout; nor can any defect of art, nor certainty of laborious disappointment, keep us from the waterside when April comes.

Next to being an expert, it is well to be a contented duffer: a man who would fish if he could, and who will pleasure himself by flicking off his flies, and dreaming of impossible trout, and smoking among the sedges Hope’s enchanted cigarettes.  Next time we shall be more skilled, more fortunate.  Next time!  “To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow.”  Grey hairs come, and stiff limbs, and shortened sight; but the spring is green and hope is fresh for all the changes in the world and in ourselves.  We can tell a hawk from a hand-saw, a March Brown from a Blue Dun; and if our success be as poor as ever, our fancy can dream as well as ever of better things and more fortunate chances.  For fishing is like life; and in the art of living, too, there are duffers, though they seldom give us their confessions.  Yet even they are kept alive, like the incompetent angler, by this undying hope: they will be more careful, more skilful, more lucky next time.  The gleaming untravelled future, the bright untried waters, allure us from day to day, from pool to pool, till, like the veteran on Coquet side, we “try a farewell throw,” or, like Stoddart, look our last on Tweed.

A BORDER BOYHOOD

A fisher, says our father Izaak, is like a poet: he “must be born so.”  The majority of dwellers on the Border are born to be fishers, thanks to the endless number of rivers and burns in the region between the Tweed and the Coquet—a realm where almost all trout-fishing is open, and where, since population and love of the sport have increased, there is now but little water that merits the trouble of putting up a rod.

Like the rest of us in that country, I was born an angler, though under an evil star, for, indeed, my labours have not been blessed, and are devoted to fishing rather than to the catching of fish.  Remembrance can scarcely recover, “nor time bring back to time,” the days when I was not busy at the waterside; yet the feat is not quite beyond the power of Mnemosyne.  My first recollection of the sport must date from about the age of four.  I recall, in a dim brightness, driving along a road that ran between banks of bracken and mica-veined rocks, and the sunlight on a shining bend of a highland stream, and my father, standing in the shallow water, showing me a huge yellow fish, that gave its last fling or two on the grassy bank.  The fish seemed as terrible and dangerous to me as to Tobit, in the Apocrypha, did that ferocious half-pounder which he carries on a string in the early Italian pictures.  How oddly Botticelli and his brethren misconceived the man-devouring fish, which must have been a crocodile strayed from the Nile into the waters of the Euphrates!  A half-pounder!  To have been terrified by a trout seems a bad beginning; and, thereafter, the mist gather’s over the past, only to lift again when I see myself, with a crowd of other little children, sent to fish, with crooked pins, for minnows, or “baggies” as we called them, in the Ettrick.  If our parents hoped that we would bring home minnows for bait, they were disappointed.  The party was under the command of a nursery governess, and probably she was no descendant of the mother of us all, Dame Juliana Berners.  We did not catch any minnows, and I remember sitting to watch a bigger boy, who was angling in a shoal of them when a parr came into the shoal, and we had bright visions of alluring that monarch of the deep.  But the parr disdained our baits, and for months I dreamed of what it would have been to capture him, and often thought of him in church.  In a moment of profane confidence my younger brother once asked me: “What do you do in sermon time?  I,” said he in a whisper—“mind you don’t tell—I tell stories to myself about catching trout.”  To which I added similar confession, for even so I drove the sermon by, and I have not “told”—till now.

By this time we must have been introduced to trout.  Who forgets his first trout?  Mine, thanks to that unlucky star, was a double deception, or rather there were two kinds of deception.  A village carpenter very kindly made rods for us.  They were of unpainted wood, these first rods; they were in two pieces, with a real brass joint, and there was a ring at the end of the top joint, to which the line was knotted.  We were still in the age of Walton, who clearly knew nothing, except by hearsay, of a reel; he abandons the attempt to describe that machine as used by the salmon-fishers.  He thinks it must be seen to be understood.  With these innocent weapons, and with the gardener to bait our hooks, we were taken to the Yarrow, far up the stream, near Ladhope.  How well one remembers deserting the gardener, and already appreciating the joys of having no gillie nor attendant, of being “alone with ourselves and the goddess of fishing”!  I cast away as well as I could, and presently jerked a trout, a tiny one, high up in the air out of the water.  But he fell off the hook again, he dropped in with a little splash, and I rushed up to consult my tutor on his unsportsmanlike behaviour, and the disappointing, nay, heart-breaking, occurrence.  Was the trout not morally caught, was there no way of getting him to see this and behave accordingly?  The gardener feared there was none.  Meanwhile he sat on the bank and angled in a pool.  “Try my rod,” he said, and, as soon as I had taken hold of it, “pull up,” he cried, “pull up.”  I did “pull up,” and hauled my first troutling on shore.  But in my inmost heart I feared that he was not my trout at all, that the gardener had hooked him before he handed the rod to me.  Then we met my younger brother coming to us with quite a great fish, half a pound perhaps, which he had caught in a burn.  Then, for the first time, my soul knew the fierce passion of jealousy, the envy of the angler.  Almost for the last time, too; for, I know not why it is, and it proves me no true fisherman, I am not discontented by the successes of others.  If one cannot catch fish oneself, surely the next best thing is to see other people catch them.

My own progress was now checked for long by a constitutional and insuperable