LOCH LEFEN TROUT 



rell. Sir John Richardson, and Dr. Gunther have 

 answered these questions by pronouncing Salmo 

 levenensis an independent species. 



But finally, dear brother of the angle, and 

 most effectually, there is as much difference 

 between the killing of one of these sublime fish, 

 and the suffocating of an ordinary brown trout, 

 as there is between the conquest of our ouananiche 

 and the potting of a sucker. In full view of the 

 castled isle of Mary Stuart, one casts his delicate 

 flies, deftly knotted on the most invisible of gut. 

 As he floats toward the suggestive ruin, the scenes 

 in Queen Mary's eventful life flit before him, — 

 from her youth, whose rare beauty is immortal- 

 ized in the Orkney portrait, to the beginning 

 of the end, when, charged with complicity in 

 the murder of Darnley, she was committed to 

 Loch Leven Castle in 1567; to her escape the 

 following spring with the aid of " Little Doug- 

 las," who yielded to the power of her resistless 

 charms ; to the revolting murder that closed her 

 career in 1587, and the agony so inimitably 

 expressed in the livid pallor and contracted 

 features of the Abbotsford painting of the Queen's 

 head- after decollation — but, look ! that gleam 

 through a wave's crest ! Instinctively your 

 wrist turns, and the barb of your tiny hook is 



197 



