Angling Sketches | Page 6

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 aversion to angling with worm. If the gardener, or a pretty
girl-cousin of the mature age of fourteen, would put the worm on, I did
not "much mind"