FANCIFUL TASTE OF THE SALMON. 233 



Now, independent altogether of the views taken by 

 the gentleman in question, and of the reasons assigned 

 by him for his capricious usage, I hold this fact to be 

 worthy of some attention ; the more especially, as cer- 

 tain deductions from it, which I shall immediately set 

 forth, are fortified by other occurrences in the history of 

 fly-fishing as singular, and in some respects more inex- 

 plicable. These additional facts may be all clumped 

 together in one statement; and as, individually, they 

 are well known, I shall be at no pains to separate or par- 

 ticularise them. They consist of the proofs daily recur- 

 ring in the experience of salmon-fishers, with respect to 

 a fanciful taste as regards flies, naturally possessed by 

 the fish or inherent in it. A general instance of this 

 developes itself in the well-known circumstance that 

 salmon, in the lower parts of Tweed, are not now to be 

 allured with any degree of readiness by means of the 

 same colours and descriptions of flies as those success- 

 fully employed against them twenty or thirty years ago. 

 At that not very distant period, they were wont to be 

 taken only by a limited variety of hooks ; on few occa- 

 sions did the angler venture to experimentalise with any 

 others; he repudiated, above all, those gaudy lures 

 which are now found to be so killing, and looked with 

 strange distrust upon any Irish innovation concoctions 

 of foreign feathers and highly-stained hackles. Nor, as 

 some of this passing school continue to assert, were the 

 fish themselves a whit less capricious, but shared to a 

 tittle the prejudices and suspicions of the angler, refu- 

 sing the rich yellow of the golden pheasant, the orange 

 of the toucan, the cserulean of the blue lowrie, the 

 green of the trogon, the crimson of the parroquet, and 

 even those magical fibres which gleam on the much- 

 prized tail-feather of the blue and buff macaw. 



Salmon were then, like our sage and grey-haired fore^ 



