SALMON-FISHING 219 
to drop down-stream gently in zigzag fashion, which plays the 
flies over all the likely places. A bight is pulled in the line 
just above the reel and laid on the thwart; a pebble keeps it 
in its place, which bounces off with a fine clatter when a fish 
seizes the fly, perhaps rousing the angler from a snooze, to 
which this indolent kind of fishing renders him very prone. 
Then there ensues a fine scuffle, the sportsman seizing the rod 
in play to do battle with the salmon, the boatman reeling in 
the free lines at express speed to avoid a foul. There is 
only one river in Great Britain where harling the fly is still 
practised, the Tay to wit; but even there it has fallen out of 
favour, and casting has become more the custom of late years. 
Whether harling be practised in the Shannon, I cannot tell, 
never having angled in that noble stream; but in the 
Namsen, the Alten, and some other great rivers of Norway 
it is the rule. 
Besides the fly, there be other lures reckoned legitimate 
in angling for salmon—namely, the spinning bait, natural or 
artificial ; the boiled prawn, and the worm, each of which often 
proves successful at times when the others fail. The element 
of uncertainty, which is inseparable from every mode of taking 
fish depending upon their voluntary act, is greater in salmon- 
fishing than in any other, for the simple reason that salmon are 
never “on the feed” in fresh water. Everything depends 
upon the caprice, not the appetite, of the fish. You may fish 
over a pool with twenty salmon lying in it, yet not one may 
take the fly or other bait. On the other hand, you may hook 
and kill the only salmon in a pool at the first trial ; and again, 
you may fish over him twenty times, and never move him till 
the twenty-first, when you bring him to the gaff. The first 
salmon I ever killed in Norway afforded an instructive illus- 
tration of this glorious uncertainty. It was on the Rauma, that 
splendid torrent which tears its way through the stupendous 
Romsdal. It was five o’clock on a Saturday evening—the 
last day of June—when I arrived at the lodge, and found that 
