LOCH-FLIES. 195 



would be alike at fault in reckoning what number 

 of lines, of all descriptions, this monster must have 

 seen in his time. The amount of learning in such 

 matters which he must have accumulated during 

 a residence in the loch of probably not less than 

 fifty years, he put to a miserable use in the end 

 selling himself for a very small mess of pottage in- 

 deed, as it was a small salmon- fly with which Mr. 

 Muir accomplished the feat. His taking, or rather 

 attempting to take, the fly at all as though hooked 

 outside the jaw he rose at it can be accounted for 

 on no other supposition than that old age had weak- 

 ened his intellect, and impaired his memory. Mr. 

 Muir very properly got him stuffed with the fatal 

 hook still in his jaw. 



The common trout in lochs may be captured by 

 any of the methods usually employed in rivers, but 

 the only one of these that can be called sport, and 

 the one that undoubtedly deserves the first notice, 

 is the artificial fly. 



The notion usually entertained, that some par- 

 ticular fly is necessary for every different loch 

 that a fly will not take unless its body is made of 

 some particular dubbing, its wing of some par- 

 ticular feather, and that the least deviation from 

 rule in the colour even of the tail-tuft will injure 

 its usefulness we believe to be altogether erron- 

 eous. The prevailing opinion, that in order to be 

 successful the artificial fly must be an imitation of 

 some one of the natural flies on the water at the 



