204 BURNING THE WATER. [CHAP. v. 



made up for the purpose of " burning the water," a practice 

 which prevailed largely on the Tweed, and which afforded 

 good rough sport. The burning took place a little after sun- 

 set, when an old boat was commissioned for the purpose, and 

 flaming torches of pinewood were lighted to lure the fish to 

 their destruction. The leister, a sharp iron ftwk, was used 

 on these occasions with deadly power ; rude mirth and 

 song were usually the order of the night ; and the practice 

 being illegal was not without a spice of danger, or at least 

 a chance of a ducking. Burning the water, it must, how- 

 ever, be confessed, was more a picturesque way of poaching 

 than a means of adding legitimately to the produce of the 

 fisheries as a branch of commerce. It would have been 

 well for the salmon-fisheries had the arts of poaching never 

 extended beyond the rude practice here alluded to ; but 

 now poaching, as I have endeavoured to show, has become 

 a business, and countless thousands of the fish are swept 

 off the breeding-beds and sold to dealers. There is on most 

 rivers an organised system of taking and disposing of the fish ; 

 France, till very lately, affording the chief outlet for this kind 

 of food an outlet, however, which a recent Act of Parliament 

 has done much to close up. Legislation on the salmon ques- 

 tion has of late been greatly extended, some powerful Acts 

 of Parliament having been passed for the better regulation of 

 the various British salmon-fisheries.* 



It is recorded that at one time great hauls of salmon could 

 be taken either in the rivers of Scotland or Ireland, and that 

 in England salmon were also quite plentiful. One miraculous 



* The French government took off the import-duty on salmon in 

 1856, when foul salmon began to be exported to that country during 

 the British close-times at the rate of ,7000 per annum. A late writer 

 in Fraser's Magazine was informed by a leading fish-salesman, on the 

 16th November, that on that clay ten tons of Tweed salmon, freshly 

 caught, were in Billingsgate, two months after close-time, and despite 

 of what was thought to be effective special legislation for that river ! 



