Wet or dry, or "twixt wet and
dry," like the convivial person in the song, we could none of us raise
them. I did catch a small but beautifully proportioned and pink-fleshed
trout with the alder, but everything else, silver sedge and all,
everything from midge to May-fly, in the late twilight, was offered to
them in vain. In windy or cloudy weather it was just as useless; indeed,
I never saw them rise, except in a warm summer stillness, at and after
sunset. Probably they would have taken a small red worm, pitched into
the ripple of a rise; but we did not try that. After a few evenings,
they seemed to give up rising altogether. I don't feel certain that they
had not been netted: yet no trout seemed to be on sale in the village.
Their presence in the water may perhaps be accounted for thus: they may
have come into the loch from the river, by way of the tiny feeder; but
the river-trout are both scarce and small. A new farmer had given up
letting the water off, and probably there must have been very rich
feeding, water-shrimps or snails, which might partly account for the
refusal to rise at the artificial fly. Or they may have been ottered by
the villagers, though that would rather have made them rise short than
not rise at all.
There is another loch on an extremely remote hillside, eight miles from
the smallest town, in a pastoral country.
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