ON LAKES 101 



In the second place, there actually seems some 

 reason for believing that a disturbance of the water 

 is not always a disadvantage to the angler. I have 

 never myself had any experience to suggest this 

 possibility, and I have not witnessed any in the sport 

 of others ; but I was much impressed by a narrative, 

 suggesting the possibility, which, nearly two years 

 ago, was published in The Field. The writer told 

 how he had fished a certain salmon pool for hours, 

 and that in vain not a fish would rise. Then a 

 man came to say that there was to be blasting by 

 dynamite in a quarry close to the other side of the 

 stream ; would the angler kindly move away until 

 the rocks were riven? He went apart to a safe 

 distance ; the explosion sounded and resounded ; a 

 large fragment of the rock dropped with a great splash 

 into the pool. At the very place where the stone 

 fell, and almost before the ripples of the disturbance 

 had died away, the angler raised and hooked a 

 salmon ! This set him thinking ; and he came to 

 the conclusion that the fish had risen because of the 

 fall of the large stone, not in spite of it. His theory 

 is that the salmon are sometimes languid, or indolent, 

 disinclined either to rise at a fly or to seize a minnow, 

 and that a shock of astonishment may wake them 

 up. At first I suspected him to be joking ; but I 

 have since come upon a responsible statement that 

 seems remarkably like corroboration. In Almond 

 of Loretto, a very attractive biography of a singu- 

 larly shrewd genius, Mr. Robert Jameson Mackenzie 

 writes : " One of the Alstons was a good caricaturist, 



