48 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF 



devised, would have tempted me so much as to 

 look at it. The freshet, however, still con- 

 tinued; there was good swimming- water, and 

 that very night, my faithful companion by my 

 side, I ascended the heavy fall which descended 

 the * cauld ' or dam, and proceeded onwards 

 towards those faintly but dearly remembered 

 scenes of my early youth, the waters of Upper 

 Tweed. 



" I may here correct a very common error as 

 to the manner in which we salmon ascend a 

 rapid. In many pictures, in many books, we 

 are represented as leaping over a rapid some 

 fifteen or twenty feet in height. This is simply 

 absurd. Excepting in the exuberance of spirits, 

 occasioned by escape from danger, the attempt 

 to escape that danger, or under the peculiar 

 influence caused by a change in the weight of 

 the atmosphere, we never jump : we swim 

 upwards, and the effort carries us beyond the 

 surface high into the air; we swim up a 

 rapid, and what appears like a jump is nothing 

 more than the abortive result of a misdirected 

 effort ; an attempt, in fact, to swim in a per- 

 pendicular direction up a stream, which descends 

 more or less horizontally. 



