A BORDER BOYHOOD 19 



nowned in the sporting essays of Christopher 

 North and Stoddart. Even then, thirty long years 

 ago, the old stagers used to tell us that ' the watter 

 was ovvr sair fished,' and they grumbled about the 

 system of draining the land, which makes a river a 

 roaring torrent in floods, and a bed of grey stones 

 with a few clear pools and shallows, during the 

 rest of the year. In times before the hills were 

 drained, before the manufacturing towns were so 

 populous, before pollution, netting, dynamiting, 

 poisoning, sniggling, and the enormous increase of 

 fair and unfair fishing, the border must have been 

 the angler's paradise. Still, it was not bad when 

 we were boys. We had Ettrick within a mile of 

 us, and a finer natural trout-stream there is not in 

 Scotland, though now the water only holds a sadly 

 persecuted remnant. There was one long pool 

 behind Lindean, flowing beneath a high wooded 

 bank, where the trout literally seemed never to 

 cease rising at the flies that dropped from the 

 pendant boughs. Unluckily the water flowed out 

 of the pool in a thin broad stream, directly at 

 right angles to the pool itself. Thus the angler 



