THE TAY 163 



picious ; but he never again touched upon the 

 subject. Some time afterwards, wandering near 

 the scene of his operations, he saw an immense 

 carving of a pike placed upon a pole near the 

 margin of the water, and painted beautifully : he 

 guessed he had seen him before. 



Let us now return to the Scotch rivers. 



The Tay, which rises from, and is approximated 

 by, vast and desolate regions of moss and moor, 

 preserves its volume of water much longer than 

 those rivers that have their sources in a more 

 pastoral and agricultural country, and of course is 

 much longer in good order for fly fishing. But 

 when the black clouds burst over the vast wilder- 

 ness of mountains, a hundred torrents gleam on all 

 sides, rush down the rocky ravines, and change the 

 burns into turbulent rivers, which pour their floods 

 into the mighty channel of the Tay : thus this 

 river probably carries more water to the ocean than 

 any other in Great Britain. 



I have read much of the rapids of the great 

 rivers in America, and the difficulty of steering 

 and shooting down them in safety ; and the accom- 

 paniments of the scenery, and the descriptions of 

 these cataracts, have always appeared to me 

 singularly wild and picturesque. They made so 

 great an impression upon my mind that, to form a 

 more correct idea of the sort of thing, I meditated 

 a voyage down the Tay when, filled with her 

 countless tributaries, she goes raging to the ocean. 

 Besides this inducement, I had some small boats 

 which I wished to take to Perth by water, instead 

 of land carriage ; for I was changing my quarters 



