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CHAPTER VI. 



THE TEVIOT AND ITS TRIBUTARIES. 



" Sweet Teviot ! on thy silver tide 



The glaring bale-fires blaze no more; 

 No longer steel-clad warriors ride 

 Along thy, wild and willowed shore." 



The Lay of the Last Mimtrd. 



E do not know that in a single old border 

 ballad there is mention made of any kind 

 of fishing. Yet, when the deer were getting 

 scarce, as undoubtedly they must have been in the 

 sixteenth century, what sport could have been more 

 congenial to the Scotts, Elliots, Kerrs, Turnbulls, and 

 Rutherfords of Teviotdale and Jed Forest, in the in- 

 tervals of their feuds and forays, than either leistering 

 or angling for salmon in the numerous streams that 

 traverse Koxburghshire ? There is no record, so far 

 as we are aware, of the period when angling was 

 introduced into Scotland — if we recollect rightly, the 

 first mention of the " wande " as an instrument of 

 killing fish is in a statute passsed during the reign of 

 Queen Mary ; but it is certain, from Dame Juliana 

 Berners' " Treatise of Fysshinge with an Angle," 

 printed in 1496, that it was practised in England a 

 century previously, and doubtless also it was a common 

 recreation in Scotland. Sir William Wallace, as we 

 learn from Blind Harry, diverted himself bv fishing 



