Angling Sketches | Page 9

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