A UTUMN. 59 



welcome. This fisli gives super-excellent sport. Your 

 equipment is heavier than that used for brown trout, and 

 lighter than salmon gear. A well-balanced double-handed 

 rod that will answer also for grils is the weapon, and there 

 is no need whatever for the coarse gut footline which 

 in both Scotland and Ireland the native anglers deem 

 essential. The gut must be of the purest quality, but 

 medium size is ample. The difficulty here is to obtain 

 flies that are tied upon gut to correspond, and this is a 

 difficulty which causes annoyance to all classes of 

 anglers. It is a forcible argument in favour of the 

 new fashion of eyed flies for every description of fly 

 fishing. The sea-trout is found in most salmon rivers, of 

 course, and in the lakes, but his chief recommendation 

 to me is that he runs up small streams, which but for him 

 would never be visited by any of the silvery visitors. 



There is in my mind's eye at the present a narrow/ river, 

 if I may so term it, which has no name upon the map. 

 Within a hundred yards of the sea I could leap across it in 

 two places. You can reach its infant stage by tramping a 

 couple of miles up the moor through a heathery bog, and 

 follow it down through, at first, a series of rough, rocky leaps, 

 next through a sequestered glen, and finally through a 

 descending mile of turning and twisting. This streamlet, 

 up to the heaped-up rocklets, is a succession of pools and 

 streams, alternating with perfectly dull water. In the 

 autumn the sea-trout swarm in every one of them, though 

 they do not reach the maximum size. In the next river 

 on the same coast, and not twenty miles distant, five-pound 

 fish are not rare, but in my nameless stream you create a 

 sensation at the village post-office — which is the Rialto of 

 that Highland community — if you kill one of three pounds. 

 Two pounds seems to be an average, and may I never 



