SKETCH OF THE AUTHOR'S LIFE. 13 



brances of sport, and friends, and merry hours, be- 

 came the silver bond that knitted all his sympathies 

 to the locality of St Boswells. The kind of Aus- 

 trian rigour with which angling privilege on the 

 river is now protected had then no existence. 

 There is not a shadow of a doubt that the Tweed 

 was then far more the poor man's river than it is now. 

 Things stood on an easier footing between laird and 

 commoner. John Haliburton, on his perch of Craig- 

 o'er, rented the Merton water at fifteen pounds 

 a-year, with a cow's grass, and often as he passed 

 his friend, the shoemaker's door, he called out a 

 kindly invitation for him to come down and get a 

 cast. Younger's great natural powers of observation, 

 conjoined with a wary watchfulness of fish, and steady 

 practice at the rod, united in making him a profi- 

 cient in the art. His reputation increased as his 

 friendships extended, and from far and near, his 

 fishing knowledge and company were courted. 

 Apart altogether from his literary turn and tend- 

 ency to blacken paper, he was marked off as a man 

 of note, and hailed as a " Tweedside Gnostic." The 

 shoemaker's shop was a house of call for all the 

 Waltonian brotherhood : dukes, lords, Galashiels 

 weavers, escaped Parliament men, squires, cotton 

 lords, and the whole medley whose boot heels ever 



