LOCH LEVEN 87 



east wind and a dark day. The east wind is 

 nowhere, perhaps, so bad as people fancy ; it is 

 certainly not so bad as the north wind, and on 

 Loch Leven it is the favourite. The man who is 

 lucky enough to hit on the right day, and to land 

 a couple of dozen Loch Leven trout, has very good 

 reason to congratulate himself, and need envy 

 nobody. But such days and such takes are rare, 

 and the summer of 1890 was much more unfor- 

 tunate than that of 1889. 



One great mistake is made by the company 

 which farms the Loch, stocks it, supplies the boats, 

 and regulates the fishing. They permit trolling 

 with angels, or phantoms, or the natural minnow. 

 Now, trolling may be comparatively legitimate, 

 when the boat is being pulled against the wind 

 to its drift, but there is no more skill in it than in 

 sitting in an omnibus. But for trolling, many a 

 boat would come home ' clean ' in the evening, on 

 days of calm, or when, for other reasons of their 

 own, the trout refuse to take the artificial fly. Yet 

 there are men at Loch Leven who troll all day, 

 and poor sport it must be, as a trout of a pound 



