Ubomas Uofc Stottoart 503 



ing down his face, and dripping off his beard and hair. 

 I cried ' Hallo ! Mr. Stoddart, what's up the day ? 

 You're killing yourself.' He gave a quiet laugh and 

 said, ' I'm doing this to let the beggars see that all fishers 

 are not liars ; for the other day, when I had killed eleven 

 fish (more than the half of which I had left with the 

 boatmen and other people at Roxburgh), they threw 

 that in my teeth ; so of course this will open their eyes 

 to see that what I have done to-day, I might have 

 done yesterday.' I think he enjoyed the discomfiture 

 of the unbelieving ' beggars.' " 



When the late Mr. W. C. Stewart, one of the grandest 

 fisherman of his own or any other day, brought out 

 his book on " Practical Angling," Stoddart was much 

 annoyed to find that its theories, which were opposed to 

 his own, found such favour with the public that " The 

 Art of Angling " and " The Angler's Companion " lost 

 their popularity. Stoddart was getting old, and, like all 

 sportsmen when they fall into the sere and yellow leaf, 

 he regarded sport from a more philosophical and leisurely 

 point of view than he had done in his hot youth. He 

 liked to saunter over his angling, 



Whiles crooning o'er some auld Scots sonnet, 



while fashioning some new one of his own. " The mere 

 monotonous slaying of trout," says Miss Stoddarti 

 " scarcely represented to him the sum of gain to be 

 derived from a day's angling." Therefore he was wroth 

 with Stewart, whose only aim seemed to be to kill fish. 

 And yet in his younger days, I fancy, Thomas Tod 

 Stoddart would have scorned as unworthy the name of 



