FISHING AT HOME AND ABROAD 

 of angling is profitable. In most great lakes salmon lie too deep to be 

 attracted by surface lures; but there are smaller sheets of water with 

 a moderate average depth where excellent and exciting sport may be had 

 with the fly. Most of the fishing has to be done from a boat, which has this 

 advantage, that a lighter rod — say 14 or 15 feet long^-can be used than 

 is required in a river where long casting has to be done; but to enjoy 

 lake -fishing for salmon in perfection it must be practised where the 

 angler can cast from the shore or by wading — conditions which are seldom 

 to be obtained. The charm of such a situation consists in the wild rush 

 which a salmon, when hooked in comparatively shallow water, makes for 

 the deep, tearing out perhaps a hundred yards of line from the fisherman 

 as a fixed point. 



Another delightful feature in lake -fishing with fly is the usual charac- 

 ter of the rise. In river-fishing half — more than half — the salmon hooked 

 never break the surface when taking the fly. In four cases out of five the 

 angler feels his fish before he sees it; but in lake -fishing the proportion 

 is reversed, and this undoubtedly makes the sport more exciting. It 

 also imposes a severer test on the fisherman's skill, for he must own a 

 steady set of nerves who can refrain from striking when he sees a great 

 salmon launch himself out of the side of a wave or roll up at the fly, head 

 and tail on the rippled surface of the loch. Just as in river -fishing, so in 

 lake -fishing, the penalty for striking at a salmon on the rise is to miss the 

 chance of hooking him. 



And now let me refresh the reader, wearied with this long technical 

 dissertation, with a glimpse of Highland sport on the noblest river in 

 Scotland, as it was my privilege to enjoy it during the present year. 



Brown, blue, rifle-green, and again brown — ^these are the prevailing 

 tints in the February landscape of lower Strathspey. But the brown is 

 no uniform monotone; that term must serve to express many shades — 

 dull umber of ploughed land, wan tint of dormant pasture, golden 

 russet of withered fern, purpled hue of budding alder and birch, tawny 

 spray of larch, and the sombre, yet kindly, gloom of moorland. 

 Thousands of acres of solemn pines mantle the uplands with rifle-green; 

 to the south, Ben Aigan and Ben Rinnes strike the note of blue, and behind 

 them the horizon is looped and folded by the great Cairngorm range — ^the 

 only Scottish mountains which the primitive Gael distinguished by the 

 epithet *'gorm" — ^blue. 



There is plenty of human industry in this spacious strath, but for the 

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