He loves better to hear the lark sing than the mouse cheep;
he wanders from depopulated stream to depopulated burn, and all is fish
that comes to his fly. Fingerlings he keeps, and does not return to the
water "as pitying their youth." Let us not grudge him his sport as long
as he fishes fair, and he is always good company. But he, with all the
other countless fishermen, make fish so rare and so wary that, except
after a flood in Meggat or the Douglas burn, trout are scarce to be taken
by ordinary skill. As for
Thae reiving cheils
Frae Galashiels,
who use nets, and salmon roe, and poisons, and dynamite, they are
miscreants indeed; they spoil the sport, not of the rich, but of their
own class, and of every man who would be quiet, and go angling in the
sacred streams of Christopher North and the Shepherd. The mills, with
their dyes and dirt, are also responsible for the dearth of trout.
Untainted yet thy stream, fair Teviot, runs,
Leyden sang; but now the stream is very much tainted indeed below Hawick,
like Tweed in too many places. Thus, for a dozen reasons, trout are nigh
as rare as red deer. Clearburn alone remains full of unsophisticated
fishes, and I have the less hesitation in revealing this, because I do
not expect the wanderer who may read this page to be at all more
successful than myself.
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