16 FISHING GOSSIP. 
youth to manhood—with Burns I might literally 
say— 
“We twa ha’e paidelt in the burn, 
Frae morning sun till dine ; 
But seas between us braid ha’e roared, 
Sin’ auld lang syne”— 
and never observed a single trait of the defamatory 
character with which he has been branded in syste- 
matic works. On the contrary, we shall see pre- 
sently that he is quite an epicure in diet, and playful 
as a kitten on his own domestic hearth. In no stage 
of his existence can he well be confounded with his 
cousins of the river. Even in his infancy there is a 
breadth and freedom of outline in his configuration, 
which distinguish him at once from relatives of the 
same age in brook or streamlet. When viewed play- 
ing at their favourite game of entomology, one of 
them exhibits a promise of future expansion never 
presented by the other. Not but that the latter, 
under favourable circumstances, is capable of reach- 
ing a considerable weight and size ; but the larger he 
grows the less he really resembles the Great Lake 
type. His increase is lateral rather than longitud- 
inal, as if the vertebrae refused to be parties in the 
process ; and I have seen quadrilateral monsters of 
this kind taken in small bog-lakes, which weighed 
from 9 lbs. to 10 Ibs., though not more than a dozen 
or fifteen inches long. But they were nasty tenchy 
