106 THE HISTORY AND HABITS OF THE SALMON. 



and did no violence happen to the feelings from other 

 sources, the effects of these upon wood, rock, and water 

 in a calm night might be regarded with pleasure. All 

 sensations, however, of this sort become disturbed when 

 the massacre is at its height ; fish swarthy or copper- 

 coloured, gashed, gory and slimy, meet and disgust the 

 eye ; they look more like the proceeds of the Styx than of 

 Tweed, more like reptiles, vile and unseemly both in hue 

 and proportion, than salmon. To be forced to make a 

 meal of such carrion, pinching poverty alone could do it; 

 yet if spared and ocean washed, what prime bright nutri- 

 tious fish all these at their next ascent into the river, if 

 taken at a proper stage of the journey, would have turned 

 out. This, reflection alone heightens the feeling of revolt 

 which their appearances have already engendered; but it 

 is truly heightened, and becomes almost insufferable, when 

 the eye is directed to the waste and utter destruction of 

 that provision which nature has allotted to them for the 

 purpose of propagation. The river has been despoiled in 

 this one short night of a tithe of its treasures, of thousands 

 upon thousands of those tiny pellets, upon the early de- 

 position of which depended its future supplies of salmon. 

 I am giving no exaggerated picture, I speak of occur- 

 rences that frequently happen ; I allude to occasions, 

 where from a single boat upwards of a hundred, ay, of 

 three hundred breeding fish have been speared at one time, 

 and to misname this the indulgence of a national sport, to 

 describe it by milder terms than sheer profligate spiritless 

 cruelty, is so to attempt colouring the fact as to pervert it 

 into absolute fiction. 



" This much for lawful poaching with the salmon spear 

 on Tweed. The necessity that some measures, urgent 

 and speedy, be taken to suppress it requires no farther 

 demonstration. This error or misguidance, I designate it 

 by an unwarrantably mild term, is the head and front of all 

 the offending that has been committed against the spirit 

 of laws protective, or meant to be so, of our Tweed fish- 

 ings ; and until it is put a stop to completely and finally, 

 all hope of a restitution of matters to what they have been, 

 or what they ought to be, may be thrown to the winds." 



