42 SALMON FISHING 



trout fly. The captures were noteworthy, and men- 

 tion of them is relevant now, because on the particular 

 days three or four other fishermen, all of them using 

 ordinary large salmon flies or trolling lures, went 

 empty away from the stretch on which I had not 

 wholly failed. May it not be that this was due less 

 to any abstemiousness on the part of the fish than 

 to untimeliness of the lures ? Then, it is a fact 

 within my own knowledge, though not bruited 

 abroad as the tidings from great rivers are, that at 

 the very height of summer a salmon is not un- 

 common in one or another of the many heavy 

 baskets of sea-trout, which are borne home after 

 night -fishing with gentles on the tidal reaches 

 of certain streams falling into the North Sea. 

 The streams alluded to are open to the public; 

 the sport they yield is taken as a matter of course 

 by generation after generation of dwellers in their 

 neighbourhood, one of whom told me that, fishing 

 with worms during the fall of a flood, he caught 

 ten salmon in a single day. Most of these " local 

 anglers," who hardly ever fish anywhere else, and are 

 not scientific students of natural history, have prob- 

 ably not heard that it may be from some impulse 

 other than a wish for food that salmon take the 

 lures; and, consequently, their instincts on the 

 subject, which are not without importance, have 

 never been formed into thoughts. 



It will, I trust, be noticed that in these pages 

 there is nothing like an absolute rejection of what 

 has become the accepted opinion of the scientific 



