SMITH OF DEA^STON. 69 



trout, that is, to the sea or salmon-trout, and will extend by 

 and by to other trout, of which I must speak at great length 

 anon. 



We, with fishing-rods and basket, early next morning reached 

 the banks of the Nith, so celebrated in song, duly prepared for 

 whatever might happen. We made at once for the north side of 

 the river, and commenced a sort of survey 'at and below the 

 bridge. What first engaged our attention was a matter of which 

 I full well knew the history ; the stone steps and resting-places, 

 invented by a most ingenious friend,* to enable the salmon, in 

 their annual migrations up the river, to surmount the powerful 

 river wall or mill-dam constructed a short way below the town. 

 Ingenious man ! your ideas were wholly mechanical : spinning 

 jennies, cogs and wheels, reels and levers, steam-engines, rails ! 

 Your courage and confidence in the powers of machinery were 

 indomitable, thoroughly Saxon ; subsoil ploughs, artificial drains 

 for Nature's watercourses, canals instead of rivers; nothing 

 seemed to please you that Nature had done. Hills you levelled, 

 and level grounds you made hilly. Thoroughly Saxon, you could 

 let nothing alone. Talk of going ahead ! I defy the most out- 

 and-out Kentuckian to beat you. Yet, like these men of the Far 

 West men of your own race, kith and kin, blood and bone you 

 were beaten sometimes. I have heard that you sustained a 

 defeat in the Hebrides ; somewhere about the Harris or the 

 Lewes, whose bleak and desolate bog and peat morasses, heath- 

 clad, rocky, barren hills, you proposed converting into grassy, 

 verdant, well-watered plains Devonshire meadows, irrigated and 

 fertile ! Admirable idea ! But you forgot that you were in the 

 land of the Celt. The man who is born and brought up and 

 dies at last in poverty, misery, famine absolute, by the banks 

 of lakes abounding in glorious trout, at the sight of which old 

 Izaak's eyes would have sparkled; trout finer than any he ever 

 saw, and yet the Celt 011 the banks of these lakes knows not even 

 of their existence, makes no effort to take them; for him, reduced 

 to villanage and misery by Celtic landlordism, Nature has spread 



Mr. Smith, of Deanston. 



