128 The Atlantic Salmon 



my return from Canada I killed three fish, thirty, twenty-four, 

 and eighteen pounds, not one of which went twenty yards, or 

 once showed himself. As for any sport they gave, I would as 

 soon have been fast to a log. The Dee and the Spey fish play 

 better. I had once great sport with a thirty pounder on the 

 Dee hooked in the back fin, but the Tweed fish rarely show 

 any sport. I have heard it said that our fish are dull because 

 they come up in the Autumn, but on the Ligne in Ross-shire 

 they run in May. In that river I killed several large fish, one 

 of them thirty-eight pounds, which I saw enter the pool nearest 

 to the sea but a few minutes before I hooked him. He fought 

 but little and I had him out in twenty minutes. My keeper on 

 the Dee, the year before he entered my service, landed on the 

 fishing below mine a fresh-run salmon of fifty-seven pounds in 

 fifteen minutes. It was all so easy he described it as * quite 

 frivolous Hke.' My belief is that the explanation is to be found 

 in the exhilarating character of the Canadian and Norwegian 

 climates which, unlike ours, are not subject to sudden atmos- 

 pheric changes, to which fish and animals are so keenly alive, 

 and that the best of our fishing is had after the nets are taken 

 off in September, when the salmon are in more or less a gravid 

 state." 



This is a question on which it would be inter- 

 esting to have the opinions of a number of an- 

 glers who have fished here and in Britain. My 

 own experience has been small on the other side 

 and confined to the Gal way, where I had excel- 

 lent sport the first half of April, twenty years 

 since, and lately to two small rivers, the Kerry 



