NORTHUMBERLAND 



is of the smallest, mounted on a cast of the finest 

 drawn gut, and the float of the diminutive pattern 

 colloquially known as a tooth-pick. The modus operandi 

 is to let the worm trail along close to the bottom, 

 and to strike at the very first twitch of the tiny float. 

 The fine quality of the gut makes striking a delicate 

 operation, while a strong November or December 

 grayling will for the same reason put up a big fight. 

 And these are the months most affected by the artists 

 of this craft. The local fishermen were sedulously 

 cultivating it when I was last on the Till, fired by the 

 performances of two experts from Yorkshire, who, 

 they assured me, had taken twenty or thirty pounds 

 of grayling in a day from two or three hundred yards 

 of water. Possibly a large company of qualified locals 

 proceeding at that rate have reduced the stock of 

 grayling in the Till, but I doubt it. Salmon, sea 

 trout, and bull trout run up the river and its tributaries 

 in the summer and autumn, though I do not think 

 are taken in very appreciable numbers. It is quite 

 a sight to watch the latter leaping the dam on the 

 Wooler burn, a large confluent of the Till, which runs 

 down from the Cheviots, and not, I think, patronised 

 by grayling for its impetuous character. 



My friend and neighbour above mentioned in con- 

 nection with a fine basket of grayling on the Glen — 

 the first, by the way, he had ever caught in his life — 

 is a man to whom notable feats have been frequently 

 vouchsafed, and he had a successful adventure with 

 a sea trout a day or two after on the same river, the 

 like of which I have never known. As the fish is snug 

 in a glass case within a few hundred yards of me as I 



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