150 ANGLING. 



more desirous of immediate gain than regardful of 

 the natural harvest of future years. At the same 

 time, there is no need of being very sentimental on 

 the subject. One man will hold up his hands in 

 mournful reproval of another who has just killed a 

 large female fish full of roe he, the upholding re- 

 prover, having himself- in the preceding spring, or 

 even a few weeks before of that same melancholy 

 autumn, killed his dozens of fair females in better 

 case no doubt but which, had they been left to 

 the guidance of " their own sweet will," would by 

 that time have been precisely in the same condi- 

 tion. The chief difference is, that a female fish, 

 far advanced in roe, and likewise far advanced up 

 the country, is less worth eating, and therefore, in 

 one sense, less worth killing than another of slim- 

 mer form and more silvery lustre, who is kept in 

 active exercise by seals and porpoises at the river's 

 mouth, or near that litigated line, 



" Where ocean trembles for her green domain," 



as, indeed, she has grievous cause to do, when a 

 jury of her countrymen declare that she is not the 

 sea.* 



Salmon generally delay entering the rivers in 

 great numbers until the streams become somewhat 



* We here allude more particularly to the disputed case of the 

 Cromarty stake-nets, Hay Mackenzie and others v. Home, decided 

 at Edinburgh against the defendant (the judicial factor), but wisely 

 withdrawn by the suspenders on the eve of a new trial (bill of ex- 

 ceptions having been allowed on appeal to the House of Lords) at 

 Inverness, where people have probably some notion of salt water. 



