RAIN. 



THE two great enemies of the angler are the east 

 wind and the drought, and the latter is the worse 

 of the two ; for though the former makes the fish 

 shy of biting, yet that is not so bad as having no 

 water to fish in. When the rivers are low and 

 clear, the salmon-fisher is in despair, and as his 

 holiday slips away with day after day of dry 

 Weather, he begins to feel the most miserable man 

 in creation. He knows that numbers of salmon 

 are waiting in the estuary, or in the lower pools of 

 the river, for the water to come down in a spate, so 

 that they may make a straight run up to their 

 spawning grounds, but nothing larger than a small 

 parr can go up the fords, over which the water 

 trickles in decreasing volume. And those fish that 

 are in the pools, trout included, grow shy and 

 suspicious, as their liberty is circumscribed by the - 

 narrowing banks, and they are crowded against 

 their fellows. 



The trout-fisher has this advantage over the 

 salmon-fisher : he can seek out some shaded burn, 

 and there practise the mode of fishing described in 

 our paper "The Linn," a method which, however 



