80 ANGLING FOE OUANANICHE 



his delicate flies deftly knotted on the most invisible of gut. As he 

 floats towards the suggestive ruin, the scenes in Queen Mary's event- 

 ful life flit before him from her youth, whose rare beauty is im- 

 mortalized in the Orkney portrait, to the beginning of the end, 

 when, charged with complicity in the murder of Darnley, she was 

 committed to Loch Leven Castle in 1567 ; to her escape the follow- 

 ing spring with the aid of 'Little Douglas,' who yielded to the 

 power of her resistless charms ; to the revolting murder that closed 

 her career in 1587, and the agony so inimitably expressed in the 

 livid pallor and contracted features of the Abbotsford painting of 

 the queen's head after decollation but look ! that gleam through 

 a wave's crest ! that flash of bluish silver beneath the flies, like the 

 sudden blaze of an old-mine diamond ! Instinctively your wrist 

 turns, and the barb of your tiny hook is set in the lip of a one-and- 

 a-half-pound Loch Leven trout. The moment you have dreamed of 

 for years has come at last. Be cautious, for your tackle is refined 

 to the utmost, and your fish is the prince of finny diplomats. His 

 first rush is towards the drifting boat. ' Catch the pirn!' cries the 

 watchful oarsman, and in response you reel madly on the slack and 

 lead your fish successfully past the bow. Who but a lover of the 

 angle can conceive of the exalted thrill which accompanied the rush 

 of that trout at the descending 'teal and red' who else, that erethism, 

 short-lived, unearthly, that electrified every nerve in your frame as 

 you twisted the steel into his jaw and felt him ' fast ' that con- 

 centration of delight in the struggle that followed, wherein the no- 

 blest fish that God has made matched his brute intellect, perhaps 

 his manifold experience, against your reason and art; wherein your 

 wand-like Leonard gracefully responded to his desperate leaps for 

 life, and arched in perfection to his wild circles. Who but an an- 

 gler knows of the sweet calm that followed victory, as you tenderly 

 placed your dying captive on the skiff bottom, and, wearied by the 

 excitement, sat down to watch his brilliance fade, with the feeling 

 that if your life were forthwith to end, you had not altogether lived 

 in vain." 



Dr. Knox, describing the Loch Leven trout in his 



Fish and Fishing in the Lone Glens of Scotland, says : 



"It is a beautiful, silvery, dark-spotted trout, of a species quite 

 distinct from all river-trout, and imagined by some to be peculiar 



