234 FISHING GOSSIP. 



and not in the fish, we returned towards the place 

 whence, on false pretences, we had been taken, 

 weighed down by a sense of humiliation, and by that 

 heaviest of all burdens a light basket ; but our grief 

 was turned, not quite to joy, but to astonishment, by 

 finding that everybody who had impudence and im- 

 portunity enough to overcome our reluctance to ex- 

 hibiting our capture regarded us, not with the con- 

 tempt we thought we merited, but with admiration 

 and envy. " Sic a grand basket !" "the like o' that 

 hasna been seen here for a dizen years " were among 

 the exclamations which greeted the display of two or 

 three dozen of ill-thriven, ill-coloured dwarfs. The fact 

 was that, from the want of a proper standard, having 

 never in their lives seen " a good basket," the people in 

 that district did not know what a fair day's fishing 

 meant, in the signification which that phrase bears in the 

 happier regions of Tweed and her tributaries. And 

 here let it be said in passing, that the violent differ- 

 ences between the number and condition of the trouts 

 in the waters -of different districts, between which no 

 material difference atmospheric, aquatic, or geologic, 

 is to be detected, is a matter regarding which less is 

 known, and, which does not necessarily follow, less 

 has been said, than on almost any other point con- 

 nected with angling. A similar confusion of tongues 

 often arises in speaking of angling at different seasons : 

 what is properly enough called good fishing in and 



