1 78 SOME WRITERS ON THE GENTLE CRAFT 



" But few were the days ' good for the Brother Loch.' Perch 

 rarely failed you, for by perseverance you were sure to fall in with 

 one circumnatatory school or other, and to do murderous work 

 among them with the mauk, from the schoolmaster himself inclu- 

 sive down to the little booby of the lowest form. Not so with 

 trout. We have angled ten hours a day for half a week (during 

 the vacance) without ever getting a single rise, nor could even that 

 be called bad sport, for we lived in momentary expectation, mingled 

 with fear, of a monster. Better far from sunrise to sunset never to 

 move a fin, than oh ! me miserable ! to hook a huge hero with 

 shoulders like a hog play him till he comes floating side up close 

 to the shore, and then to feel the fleckless fly leave his lip and 

 begin gamboling in the air, while he wallops away back into his 

 native element, and sinks utterly and for evermore into the dark 

 profound. Life loses at such a moment all that makes life desirable 

 yet strange ! the wretch lives on and has not the heart to 

 drown himself, and he wrings his hands and curses his lot and the 

 day he was born. But, thank Heaven, that ghastly fit of fancy is 

 gone by, and we imagine one of those dark, scowling, gusty, almost 

 tempestuous days, ' prime for the Brother Loch.' No glare or 

 glitter on the water, no reflection of fleecy clouds, but a black-blue 

 undulating swell, at times turbulent with now and then a breaking 

 wave that was the weather in which the giants fed, showing their 

 backs like dolphins within a fathom of the shore, and sucking in 

 the red heckle among your very feet." 



Talking of giants and monsters, we have a laughable 

 companion picture in the " Noctes," where the Shep- 

 herd, posing as a border Baron Munchausen, tells in 

 the richest Doric, and with a marvellous wealth of 

 imagery, how he hooked and killed his <c three stane 

 salmon," following him like an otter between land 

 and water in a cork jacket, and finally " gripping " and 

 landing him in his teeth. And the actual incidents of 

 the struggle are made so true to realities that we almost 

 forget we are listening to a rhapsody of the fancy. 



