To Mountain Tarn 



The Fifeshire Eden is a water. A long cast 

 reaches the sedges on the far side. The rod 

 commands every eddy, each swirl round a 

 boulder, or spreading ring of rising trout. Never- 

 theless, it is not as other streams are. It is 

 sluggish of temper ; it has no lively moods. 

 Current does not slacken into pool, nor pool 

 laugh into current ; but pool and current are 

 much alike. To its natural faults is added a 

 certain fitful interference. It is nursed for the 

 many mills. A sluice is raised and it runs high, 

 a sluice is dropped and it vanishes down the 

 grass blades. Perhaps no stream in Scotland 

 is so tantalizing as that which runs along the 

 streak of upper old red sandstone to St. Andrews 

 bay. None with a greater number of barren 

 days and empty creels. 



The flies are of the minutest. The advice of 

 an old angler is to put on no more than one. The 

 gut is gossamer of texture. The delicacy of a 

 woman's with the command of a man's must be 

 in the casting hand. Unexciting, if picturesque, is 

 the rough way down the stream. The drowsing 

 currents, the dreaming pools under the length- 

 ening afternoon shadows, keep the angler only 

 half awake. The trout are the dreamers below. 

 The psychological moment is where the Ceres 

 burn ripples into the main stream, over the fossil 

 fishes of Dura Den sleeping a dreamless sleep, 

 aeons on aeons. 



