92 FORAYS AMONG SALMON AND DEER. 



four or five pounds' weight, who got himself caught 

 by mistake ; but after teasing me for a couple of 

 minutes, he had quietly slipt off, and I saw no more of 

 him. 



My companion, as I found on joining him, had 

 secured one fish, which he had hooked, by dropping 

 the fly cleverly under his gills, and then, by a sudden 

 jerk, fixing it in his jaws. It proved a pretty good 

 one, weighing about seven pounds. We now, as a last 

 resource, struck across the moor, for a mountain loch, 

 famous for a large kind of trout, commonly called the 

 " bull-trout ; " some, it was said, having been taken 

 there up to ten pounds in weight. 



On our way thither, as we were leaping from stone 

 to stone up the rugged course of a mountain burn, 

 which had lately been considerably swollen by the 

 rain, though it was now almost dry, we came upon a 

 sea-trout of about four pounds weight, lying on the 

 shingle dead, but quite fresh. As there were no marks 

 of violence about him, he had not been conveyed 

 thither by an otter, or any other enemy, but had 

 evidently become the victim of his own rashness ; his 

 natural instinct having led him to follow the course of 

 the burn too far. He had ascended at least three 

 hundred feet above the level of the river we had just 

 left ; but though the ascent had been easy, as well as 

 natural, at the time he made it, on the burn's sub- 

 sequently sinking to its ordinary dimensions, he had 

 been left there a monument of the folly and danger, 

 even in the brute creation, of aspiring too high, and of 

 the truth of the doctrine that the most elevated 

 stations are not necessarily the most happy or secure. 



" Often to our comfort shall we find 

 The sharded beetle in a safer hole, 

 Than is the full- winged eagle." 



