SALMON ANQLINO IN lEELAND. 177 



Removing the rejected pair, we substituted the latest specimen of 

 my companion's handiwork, and without further preliminaries sent 

 it flying across the stream. Hitherto the fish had been hard to 

 please, but this time he was less fastidious, and rushed at it like a 

 hungry dragon. Such a rise is the culminating point of human 

 felicity. 



" He's a dead one, I know, Pat," mumbled Mr. Willie, whose lips, 

 at that moment holding a topping and piece of tinsel, were not well 

 adapted for oratorical display. " He's safe any way, and see if I 

 don't roast him. Won't we, master?" Now this form of speech 

 was common with my old friend first an assertion, and next an 

 interrogation ; but, as he usually had his own way, the latter was 

 understood to be a mere matter of form. Now our salmon, whose 

 ultimate destiny had been so satisfactorily settled, though pronounced 

 moribund was remarkably lively, and, after executing five or six 

 summersaults in the neatest fashion, took a desparate race, tore the 

 hook from his jaw, and went on his way rejoicing. The Island, 

 Cruckane, and the Eock were unprofitable speculations ; and then 

 came Mullins's Pool. Here the hopes of the would-be cook revived ; 

 and when a choice between an eight-pounder, a five, and a four was 

 presented to him, the chef's satisfaction knew no bounds. Lynche's 

 Pool gave us another, the Stonewall Cast a fifth, and there seemed 

 every prospect of making a good bag ; but soon the wind died away 

 and the sun came out with such scorching brilliancy as blistered 

 both face and hands that is, my countenance and upper extremities, 

 those of my comrades being fireproof. 



How grateful was the shade afforded by a small aspen tree, whose 

 broad leaves throbbed and fluttered, though to my heated skin not 

 an air was appreciable. It reminded one of the academic groves we 

 used to read of at school, only there seemed more reality about it. 

 To a lover of nature Mayo is a wild and beautiful county, whose 

 rivers are manifold, whose mountains are lovely and sublime, 

 wrapped in their mantles of purple heath and crowned with 

 diadems of granite, and whose lakes, so capable of utilisation, now 

 only bear on their broad bosoms the peasant's barge or the fisher's 



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