FISHING IN RIVER, STREAM, AND LOCH 163 



torpedo, straight at your boots. As the hobnails slip 

 about on the moss-grown boulder, your heart jumps 

 towards your throat, and you feel for a moment that 

 all must be over. But when persistency in his strategy 

 might have saved him, he changes it ; and you can 

 straighten the rod that was hampered by the trees, and 

 haul in the line through the rings in a handful. For 

 out he goes again to mid-stream, turning the silvery 

 wheel in showers of waterworks, while in each of his 

 swift revolutions you seem to shave a catastrophe. He 

 is bent apparently on going back to the sea ; he makes 

 a resolute dart for the channel, where the pool, break- 

 ing into a stream, flows swiftly down the incline of a 

 shelving staircase. There is nothing for it but to let 

 him go or to follow. A contemplative amusement ! 

 There is little time for meditation, though you never 

 needed more the inspiration of thought. You are 

 plunging to mid-thigh in the rushing water, seeking a 

 doubtful foothold where you may doing your best 

 with your heavy rod with one hand, while clinging to 

 the slippery rocks with the other ; struggling forward 

 somehow with the shoulders uppermost, and breathing 

 hard all the time, like a hunted otter. Were you ever 

 conscious of a more blissful sensation of relief than 

 when, safely landed on the smooth sward lower down, 

 you have a reach of comparatively uncheckered water 

 before you with shelving gravel in that tiny bay ? If 

 line and hook will only hold there should be but one 

 conclusion now to the hard-fought battle, and it is on 

 that strip of yellow beach you mean to land him. A 



