WHAT MAKES AN ANGLER. 99 



defeat teaches us wisdom, and successive failures add 

 so many fresh wrinkles. Skill, even ordinary skill, is 

 only acquired at the cost of frequent disappointment ; 

 and he who would be successful among the salmon, 

 must be content to lose many a fly, if nothing worse. 

 Moreover he might as well be a rod without a line, as 

 an angler without patience. The struggle which has 

 been cautiously carried on for an hour, may be lost by 

 the hastiness of a moment. Every movement of the 

 fish must be studied, and acted upon with discretion. 

 The state of the weather, the wind and the water, must 

 each come under consideration, and receive their due 

 attention. A rash ignoramus might fish the very best 

 stream, and one day never have a rise, while the next 

 day, with rises innumerable, he might never hook a 

 fish. He must be prepared, as well against the 

 prolonged struggle of the sullen, as against the short- 

 lived but not less trying plunges of the desperate 

 fish. 



I lately heard the confessions of a shepherd, within 

 whose shieling I had accidentally discovered, carefully 

 concealed beneath the heather thatch, a home-made 

 but serviceable salmon-rod. He owned he had a great 

 fondness for the sport, having been born and grown up 

 in those halcyon days when every poor man was free 

 to feed wife and bairns on the salmon from the stream 

 that bowled by his door ; and he still had, he admitted, 

 an occasional harmless cast, which I, for my part, 

 could not grudge him. 



The fiercest struggle with a fish he " minded," was 

 one which continued through a whole night. Having 

 in the evening hooked a very large salmon, and his 

 line being but short, he was forced " to bow to the 

 blast," as he expressed himself, in the hopes that he 

 might eventually weary the creature out. At first he 



