riSII IN THE FEITII, 75 



from the Blackweel to the Cauldron Linn, on a July or August 

 day, the waters full and dark, the sky cloudy, air soft. One 

 stream may suffice. Scene of my early youth ! where oft have I 

 wandered, dreaming of the future and the past, of what I had 

 read of foreign lands, which I myself was destined one day to 

 visit. 



The minnows caught by the net in the Nith were like other 

 minnows ; and they are mentioned here and described here, not 

 as being in themselves peculiar, but by indication of the small- 

 ness of the meshes of the net to warrant a belief that nothing- 

 much escaped it. I was watching the exploration of a stream I 

 had never thought to have seen fished in this way ; a stream on 

 whose banks, some miles higher up,* many ingenious experiments 

 were made, or said to have been made, in order to ascertain what 

 a parr is ; experiments made by men uneducated, deeply preju- 

 diced, despisers of scientific truth. I shall show, by and by, how 

 their experiments failed. In the meantime, I should like my 

 reader, whether angler or not, to note carefully with me what 

 the net showed to be in the river Nith, from the mill-dam to the 

 Solway, or nearly so, during an autumnal day. The fish caught 

 in the net were, to the best of my recollection, minnows and 

 small flounders ; the fry of what the intelligent tacksman and 

 my own convictions decided to be that of herring, the salmon, 

 the salmon-trout, the hirling, the parr, river trout of two kinds, 

 one delicate to eat, with pink-coloured flesh ; the other a coarser 

 fish as to flavour, and strongly resembling the common trout of 

 the Nith, taken in the river and streams above the dam, and now 

 found in those waters in which lawyers have so often fished with 

 great success, namely, " the waters, or rivers, or parts of rivers, 

 into which the tide ebbs and flows." All these^ on our return to 

 the inn, we examined carefully ; their external appearance, their 

 interior anatomy, the food found in their stomachs. But in 

 the meantime, whilst watching by your banks, beauteous and 

 melancholy Nith ! the sweep of the net, examining the contents 

 of each cast, selecting therefrom what we chose pleasant and 

 interesting conversation with the tacksman made the time so 



* At Drumknrij 



