“the take” was to waste the day, at least in fly-fishing.  From a high wooded bank I have seen the trout feeding, and they have almost ceased to feed before I reached the waterside.  Still worse was it to be allured into water over the tops of your waders, early in the day, and then to find that the rise was over, and there was nothing for it but a weary walk home, the basket laden only with damp boots.  Still, the trout were undeniably there, and that was a great encouragement.  They are there still, but infinitely more cunning than of old.  Then, if they were feeding, they took the artificial fly freely; now it must be exactly of the right size and shade or they will have none of it.  They come provokingly short, too; just plucking at the hook, and running out a foot of line or so, then taking their departure.  For some reason the Tweed is more difficult to fish with the dry fly than—the Test, for example.  The water is swifter and very dark, it drowns the fly soon, and on the surface the fly is less easily distinguished than at Whitchurch, in the pellucid streams.  The Leader a tributary, may be fished with dry fly; on the Tweed one can hardly manage it.  There is a plan by which rising trout may be taken—namely, by baiting with a small red worm and casting as in fly-fishing.  But that is so hard on the worm!  Probably he who can catch trout with fly on the Tweed between Melrose and Holy Lee can catch them anywhere.  On a good day in April great baskets are still made in preserved parts of the Tweed, but, if they are made in open water, it must be, I fancy, with worm, or with the “screw,” the lava of the May-fly.  The screw is a hideous and venomous-looking animal, which is fixed on a particular kind of tackle, and cast up stream with a short line.  The heaviest trout are fond of it, but it can only be used at a season when either school or Oxford keeps one far from what old Franck, Walton’s contemporary, a Cromwellian trooper, calls “the glittering and resolute streams of Tweed.”

Difficult as it is, that river is so beautiful and alluring that it scarcely needs the attractions of sport.  The step banks, beautifully wooded, and in spring one mass of primroses, are crowned here and there with ruined Border towers—like Elibank, the houses of Muckle Mou’ed Meg; or with fair baronial houses like Fernilea.  Meg made a bad exchange when she left Elibank with the salmon pool at its foot for bleak Harden, frowning over the narrow “den” where Harden kept the plundered cattle.  There is no fishing in the tiny Harden burn, that joins the brawling Borthwick Water.

The burns of the Lowlands are now almost barren of trout.  The spawning fish, flabby and useless, are killed in winter.  All through the rest of the year, in the remotest places, tourists are hard at them with worm.  In a small burn a skilled wormer may almost depopulate the pools, and, on the Border, all is fish that comes to the hook; men keep the very fingerlings, on the pretext that they are “so sweet” in the frying-pan.  The crowd of anglers in glens which seem not easily accessible is provoking enough.  Into the Meggat, a stream which feeds St. Mary’s Loch, there flows the Glengaber, or Glencaber burn: the burn of the pine-tree stump.  The water runs in deep pools and streams over a blue slatey rock, which contains gold under the sand, in the worn holes and crevices.  My friend, Mr. McAllister, the schoolmaster at St. Mary’s, tells me that one day, when fish were not rising, he scooped out the gravel of one of these holes with his knife, and found a tiny nugget, after which the gold-hunting fever came on him for a while.  But little is got nowadays, though in some earlier period the burn has been diverted from its bed, and the people used solemnly to wash the sand, as in California or Australia.  Well, whether in consequence of the gold, as the alchemical philosophers would have held, or not, the trout of the Glengaber burn were good.  They were far shorter, thicker and stronger than those of the many neighbouring brooks.  I have fished up the burn with fly, when it was very low, hiding carefully behind the boulders, and have been surprised at the size and gameness of the fish.  As soon as the fly had touched the brown water, it was sucked down, and there was quite a fierce little fight before the fish came to hand.

“This, all this, was in the olden time, long ago.”

The Glengaber burn is about twenty miles from any railway station, but, on the last occasion when I visited it, three louts were worming their way up it, within twenty yards of each other, each lout, with his huge rod, showing himself wholly to any trout that might be left in the water.  Thirty years ago the burns that feed St. Mary’s Loch were almost unfished, and rare sport we had in them, as boys, staying at Tibbie Sheil’s famous cottage, and sleeping in her box-beds, where so often the Ettrick Shepherd and Christopher North have lain, after copious toddy.  “’Tis gone, ’tis gone:” not in our time will any man, like the Ettrick Shepherd, need a cart to carry the trout he has slain in Meggat Water.  That stream, flowing through a valley furnished with a grass-grown track for a road, flows, as I said, into St. Mary’s Loch.  There are two or three large pools at the foot of the loch, in which, as a small boy hardly promoted to fly, I have seen many monsters rising greedily.  Men got into the way of fishing these pools after a flood with minnow, and thereby made huge baskets, the big fish running up to feed, out of the loch.  But, when last I rowed past Meggat foot, the delta of that historic stream was simply crowded with anglers, stepping in in front of each other.  I asked if this mob was a political “demonstration,” but they stuck to business, as if they had been on the Regent’s Canal.  And this, remember, was twenty miles from any town!  Yet there is a burn on the Border still undiscovered, still full of greedy trout.  I shall give the angler such a hint of its whereabouts as Tiresias, in Hades, gave to Odysseus concerning the end of his second wanderings.

When, O stranger, thou hast reached a burn where the shepherd asks thee for the newspaper wrapped round thy sandwiches, that he may read the news, then erect an altar to Priapus, god of fishermen, and begin to angle boldly.

Probably the troops who fish our Border-burns still manage to toss out some dozens of tiny fishes, some six or eight to the pound.  Are not these triumphs chronicled in the “Scotsman?”  But they cannot imagine what angling was in the dead years, nor what great trout dwelt below the linns of the Crosscleugh burn, beneath the red clusters of the rowan trees, or in the waters of the “Little Yarrow” above the Loch of the Lowes.  As to the lochs themselves, now that anyone may put a boat on them, now that there is perpetual trolling, as well as fly-fishing, so that every fish knows the lures, the fun is mainly over.  In April, no doubt, something may still be done, and in the silver twilights of June, when as you drift on the still surface you hear the constant sweet plash of the rising trout, a few, and these good, may be taken.  But the water wants re-stocking, and the burns in winter need watching, in the interests of spawning fish.  It is nobody’s interest, that I know of, to take trouble and incur expense; and free fishing, by the constitution of the universe, must end in bad fishing or in none at all.  The best we can say for it is that vast numbers of persons may, by the still waters of these meres, enjoy the pleasures of hope.  Even solitude is no longer to be found in the scene which Scott, in “Marmion,” chooses as of all places the most solitary.

Here, have I thought, ’twere sweet to dwell,
And rear again the chaplain’s cell.

But no longer does

“Your horse’s hoof tread sound too rude,
So stilly is the solitude.”

Stilly! with the horns and songs from