18 



Tliero liad been a large number of salmon sliowing on a 

 rocky shallow ou the lower portion of the water I am fishing, 

 .liid rhe s})ot liad been coveted by the jealous angler above 

 ri'feued to for the past fortnight. But the fisli Avouli not" 

 take his flies, although he plied them with patterns of every 

 s])ade, and witli every lure that he could think of. On 

 Monday the wind chopped from west to south, and my man 

 Pat remarked, "If this wind holds tln,^ night, we'll have all 

 the hsh up in our pool the morn." Tlie distance Detween 

 the two ])oints is about three miles, and Pat was unable to 

 offer any other explanation of liis prophesy than the fact 

 that the fish always came from the lower to the u])])er pools 

 if the south wind lasted twelve hours. The wind held, and we 

 saw our sour old rival race oft' to secure his pool long before 

 we had breakfasted ! Sure enough the fish had come up, 

 and here they were in scores, at our A'ery door, and in the 

 first hour's fishing we had killed one s])k'ndid clean hsh, 

 fresh from the sea, and played and lost two others. Then, 

 they went olf the fly, and resolutely refused to be further 

 tempted by the brilliantly-tinted combination of fur, 

 featliers, and tinsel with which w-e sought to beguile them. 

 Spoons of silver, and spoons of gold, w^re spun in vain over 

 them, and we even resorted to prawns, with the same nega- 

 tive results, and thus the afternoon wore away, the hsh 

 meanwhile rising around us. Pat was at his A\its end, 

 working and swearing his hardest, whilst Mike exasperated 

 both master and man by incessantly suggesting that, 

 maybe, they would take things that had already been tried 

 in vain. Finally we gave up in despair, and went away to 

 another cast higher up. Here the same bad luck attended 

 us, for we only got one small fish, and lost two big fellows 

 in succession. We gave up at five o'clock, and on our way 

 dowm found a friend of mine in the pool we had left vacant. 

 He liad killed four fish, and -was plajdng his fifth, which he 

 also landed, and he took them all with a silver minnow. 

 The jealous angler got nothing. 



