MEMORIES OF EARLY DAYS 261 



describes the world of childhood as it has been 

 to all of us a world whose boundaries are un- 

 known, where everything is at the same time 

 more wonderful and more real than it seems 

 afterwards, and where mystery is our most con- 

 stant companion. So it was with me, especially 

 in the places where I fished. I used to go to 

 the lower part of this burn in the charge of an 

 old gamekeeper, and after a long journey through 

 pathless open fields, we seemed to reach a distant 

 land where things happened otherwise than in 

 the world nearer home. At the end of the 

 walk it was as if we had reached another 

 country, and were living in another day under 

 a different sky. The gamekeeper fished more 

 leisurely than I, and sometimes he would be lost 

 amongst the windings of the burn, to be found 

 again by the sight of the smoke from his pipe 

 rising gently from behind a whin bush. When 

 I now recall that distant land, I see always some- 

 where amongst the whin bushes a little curl of 

 thin smoke, and no other sign of an inhabitant. 



In course of time there came experience of a 

 fine Highland river, and lochs near it and of fly 

 fishing in them in August. The trout did not 



