80 FISH AND FISHING IN SCOTLAND. 



for this purpose, being much poached and scourged by the idle 

 and profligate of the village. But it contains trout and parr, sea 

 trout and hirling, salmon and bull trout in their season ; besides 

 pike and bream, and other coarse fish. The country around is 

 primitive, and many originals live on its banks, and around the 

 lakes of Lochmaben. The vendiss, shorn of its mystery, is still 

 fished at a particular time of the year with nets, and ate in 

 season a kind of whitebait dinner for some old-fashioned people. 

 It brings them together suspends for an jjhour or two the 

 little animosities which all farmers and small lairds have to 

 their next neighbours and benefits the inns. When other topics 

 fail, they talk of Johnny Armstrong and the Border robbers. 

 Abhorring clubs and whitebait dinners, I always avoided these 

 vendiss clubs, but I have often eaten the vendiss when just from 

 the lake. It is a moderately good fish to eat, but not to be 

 compared to the Loch Leven trout. The professed naturalist 

 arranges the vendiss with the family of the Corrigoni, a hard word 

 to pronounce. Vendiss is better and softer, so is vengis, of whose 

 root we know nothing. A fish of the same sort, but specifically 

 different, is abundant enough in Loch Lomond. They occur 

 also, though not of the same species, in Wales ; in North America 

 the natural family abounds. 



CHAPTEE IX. 



OF THE FISH CALLED PAKE, BKANDLIN, F1NGEKLING, ETC. 



THIS singular fish, whose natural history is still so mysterious, 

 is found only in rivers frequented by salmon ; I was about to 

 add, or by salmon-trout ; but of this I am not quite sure. In 

 the small stream which drains the area of that valley in Cleve- 

 land which once claimed for a resident proprietor the celebrated 

 Robert de Brus in this stream, which passes close to the village 



