82 SPINNING. 



springy to the butt, but comparatively stiff, as 

 spinning-rods must be; and I was forced to humour 

 " Esox Lucius" a good deal, as the boat danced up 

 and down. " He's twenty pound, Malcolm, if he's 

 an ounce ! " " Hoo ! hoo ! there 's nae fish here the 

 noo more than fifteen or maybe saxteen pun, and 

 few eneuch of them. It 's a big beast though, deil 

 doot it." At length I came nearly over the fish, and 

 tried to lift it a bit. I might as easily have lifted 

 the rock behind which it lay. But in a second or 

 two it took the matter entirely into its own hands 

 (as I might say in the West of Ireland], running 

 up the lake, at a slower pace certainly, but with 

 greater strength, and for a greater distance, than 

 any salmon I had ever hooked. I began to think 

 that the hundred and twenty yards of line which 

 the author of a recently-published fishing-book 

 talks of so glibly, as commonly run out by a 

 salmon, might be the fact in the case of a pike. 

 However, after clearing my reel of some sixty or 

 seventy yards, I felt I had a pull on the fish, and 

 winding up my line as quickly as possible, I 

 brought it under the point of the rod, and event- 

 ually raised it to the surface. Such a monster I 

 had never before beheld ! A salmon of thirty 

 pounds is a grand fish, but there is nothing terrible 

 in his appearance, as there really was in that of 



