102 SALMON FISHING 



and our master's eccentricities furnished him with 

 many a subject. In one of these sketches, as I 

 happen to remember, the Head was represented as 

 holding up his trousers with one hand, and stoning 

 a salmon pool with the other. His gillie John 

 Macleod, or the humorous old water -bailiff, John 

 Macdonald stood beside him with the rod. The 

 practice of stoning pools, like many other original 

 devices, was suggested by an accident. He had been 

 fishing a pool in the Kirkaig one day when a blast 

 from a neighbouring quarry threw some stones into 

 the water. Soon afterwards he caught a fish. 

 Acting on the hint, he made further experiments, 

 and came to the conclusion that the method of 

 stoning was among the resources of the complete 

 salmon angler. " That, apparently, was in 1877, 

 fully a generation before The Field chronicled an 

 exactly similar incident. If we may accept the 

 conjecture entertained independently by the writer 

 in that journal and by Mr. Hely Hutchinson Almond, 

 there is an obvious explanation of a salmon coming 

 at a minnow trailed in the wake of a boat. It may 

 be that the fish had been dozing, and was excited to 

 curiosity by the passage of the craft and the plash 

 of the oars. I myself am not prepared to endorse 

 this view ; but among the familiar phenomena of the 

 sport there is a fact by which it may possibly be 

 regarded as encouraged. Salmon, like trout, almost 

 invariably come into sportful humour when the 

 normal condition of a river has been disturbed by a 

 flood. May this be because the increased volume of 



