WHITEADDER AND LAUDERDALE 



can equal. The Leader, for its size and length, is 

 rich indeed in suggestion for those who have ears to 

 hear, though it was not precisely of the drum and 

 trumpet I was musing when gently thrilled by my 

 first sight of it, or I should not have been moved to 

 Wordsworthian quotation. 



Once more, and with apologies for such reiteration, 

 I really do not know why there are any trout at all 

 in the Leader. Its very classic qualities as a trout 

 stream should be dead against such a survival. It is 

 rural and pastoral and Arcadian enough to be sure. 

 But there are two little towns astride of its short 

 course, and pretty nearly every man and boy in both, 

 I have no doubt, knows how to fish, with a worm at 

 any rate ; while Edinburgh itself is only some twenty 

 odd miles from the head of the dale. I spent nearly 

 the whole of one recent September there in the ancient 

 little borough of Lauder, which is the capital of the 

 upper and open part of Lauderdale, as Earlston is the 

 metropolis of its lower, pent-in, and woody portions. 

 I did not go there in the main for fishing, as the month 

 selected may perhaps sufficiently indicate, but I did 

 a good deal incidentally, and in one way and another 

 covered most of the water which has moved so many 

 generations of Border fishermen and singers to con- 

 vivial or poetic invocation. This alone would have 

 interested me not a little, and as those three weeks 

 were about as hopeless from a fishing point of view as 

 the mind of angler could imagine, it was just as well 

 there were other consolations on the abounding in- 

 terests of the neighbourhood. 



For centuries the Maitlands and the Lauders were 



371 



