274 LINES IN PLEASANT PLACES 



and the fish caught would average as near J Ib. as one 

 could guess. As time went on it was evident that they 

 did not flourish in the style usual to Salrao irideus. 

 Mr. Walton was puzzled, and, in truth, so was Herr 

 Jaffe. Amongst the stock planted in the principal 

 lake there must have been an odd fontinalis or two, 

 and by and by these brilliant fish were taken, of i-lb. 

 and i^-lb. size, freely rising at a fly. In a word, the 

 fontinalis seemed in a brief space to take possession 

 and the rainbows to decrease correspondingly. The 

 first specimen Mr. Walton caught he put back as a 

 rarity, but in a year or so they were not by any means 

 strangers to be coddled. On the contrary they bred 

 well, as indeed did the rainbows. The latter, however, 

 after five or six years gradually deteriorated, while the 

 fontinalis flourished and held their own for a while. 

 Latterly they, too, had gone the way of all fontinalis, had 

 become scarcer and scarcer, and it was a rare thing to 

 catch one where they formerly abounded. 



The story of Mr. Walton's tenancy of sixteen years 

 is thus an interesting chapter in fish culture. That 

 must be my excuse for apparently labouring this matter 

 of stocking, more especially as there is still a curious 

 development to unfold. It should be stated that the 

 lake with which we are now concerned had, previous to 

 the introduction of rainbows, been emptied and re- 

 stocked, leaving probably a few of the original brown 

 trout behind. Mr. Walton thought that there were 

 some Loch Levens, and that these in recent years 

 asserted themselves, and, as he put it, " came to their 

 own." But he went on to add that a few years ago he 

 had put some minnows into the lake by the chalet, and 

 that they had multiplied like the Hebrews of old till 

 they literally swarmed. As a natural consequence the 

 trout had become bad risers, and the growing scarcity 



