MOUNTAIN BECK FISHING. 209 



no tackle beyond a yard of gut and two or three hooks in 

 a piece of brown paper ; a small bag of moss with well- 

 scoured worms within ; a sandwich or a cold mutton chop 

 the latter for preference in one pocket, and a flask of 

 the dew ' that shines in the starlight when kings dinna 

 ken ' in the ether. Far, far beyond all care ; away from 

 rates, taxes, and telegrams ; proofs, publishers, and 

 printers'-devils ; where there are neither division lists, 

 nor law lists, nor stock lists, nor share lists, nor price 

 lists, nor betting lists, nor any list whatever ; where no 

 newspaper can come to worry or unsettle you, and where 

 you don't care a straw how the world wags ; where your 

 clients are trouts, your patients worms, your congregation 

 mountain black-faces, water-ousels, and dabchicks ; your 

 court, hospital, or church the pre-Adamite hills with the 

 eternal sky above them ; your inspiration the pure breeze 

 of heaven, far, far above all earthly corruption. Here, in 

 delightful solitude, sauntering or scrambling on, and on, 

 and on, and on, upwards and upwards, from wee poolie to 

 fern-clad cascade ; casting or dropping the worm into either, 

 or guiding it deftly under each hollow bank and past each 

 ragged stone, pulling out a trout here and a trout there 

 in the fair summer weather, with now a whiff of wild 

 thyme or fragrant gorse, and now a shaugh of the pipe, 

 and an amazed and charmed gaze at the mountain crags 

 above, and the ever-changing scenery of the hills as the 

 clouds flit over them, with just sport enough to give amuse- 

 ment without enchaining the attention so much as to pre- 

 vent us drinking in all the delights that nature spreads for 

 us this is, to my mind, the true delight of angling. This 

 was my first experience, my first angling love, and will be 

 my last. What though you never get a fish over half a 

 pound? Why the half-pounder is as much the hero of 

 your day as the two-pounder is of your more pretentious 

 iriend, who spent the day up to his middle in the main 



