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.
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