MY FIEST SEA-TKOUT. 335 



captive valued over all I possessed. The first time I 

 essayed for sea-trout was when low in my teens. Previous 

 to this attempt many spotted beauties from the brooks and 

 rivers of my Highland home had filled my creel ; but I 

 was not satiated with such game, for it was far too noble 

 to have such effect ; still I craved to kill a sea-trout, for I 

 deemed it correctly the connecting link between river trout 

 and lordly salmon. 



Where mountain peak and inland loch, bubbling stream 

 and placid lake combine to make a picture worthy of an 

 artist's eye, or a landscape to be beloved by the Celt, I 

 made my debut in taking the life of the silver-sheened, 

 gracefully-built beauty, whose home is indifferently the 

 pellucid burn or the storm- tossed ocean. Of the spot where 

 my maiden effort was made history has no story to tell of 

 ruthless slaughter or blighted ambition ; still it is a 

 bonny place, and such as once gazed upon is likely not 

 easily to be forgotten. 



I allude to the head of Loch Long, in Argyleshire, 

 where the river, or rather brook, Lyon, enters the mountain- 

 fringed loch on which stands the village of Arrochar. 

 The month of August had hardly passed away when the 

 clear skies and mountain peaks became overcast with that 

 dark, drifting, humid mass of clouds that betoken a heavy 

 fall of rain. The weather-wise were not wrong in their 

 conjectures, for true the gates of heaven were opened, and 

 hill-sides and glens for two successive days were pelted with 

 the pitiless rains till the burns became brim full, and the 

 surplus water waxed wrath against the enclosing banks as 

 if the yellow, turbid stream would burst its boundary 



