12 ANGLING SKETCHES 



seems a bad beginning ; and, thereafter, the mist 

 gathers over the past, only to lift again when I see 

 myself, with a crowd of other little children, sent to 

 fish, with crooked pins, for minnows, or ' baggies ' 

 as we called them, in the Ettrick. If our parents 

 hoped that we would bring home minnows for bait, 

 they were disappointed. The party was under the 

 command of a nursery governess, and probably 



she was no descendant of the mother of us all, 

 Dame Juliana Berncrs. We did not catch any 

 minnows, and I remember sitting to watch a bigger 

 boy, who was angling in a shoal of them when a 

 parr came into the shoal, and we had bright visions 

 of alluring that monarch of the deep. But the 

 parr disdained our baits, and for months I dreamed 

 of what it would have been to capture him, and 



