234 FISHING GOSSIP. 
and not in the fish, we returned towards the place 
whence, on false pretences, we had been taken, 
weighed down by a sense of humiliation, and by that 
heaviest of all burdens—a light basket; but our grief: 
was turned, not quite to joy, but to astonishment, by 
finding that everybody who had impudence and im- 
portunity enough to overcome our reluctance to ex- 
hibiting our capture regarded us, not with the con- 
tempt we thought we merited, but with admiration 
and envy. “Sic a grand basket !”—“the like o’ that 
hasna been seen here for a dizen years ”—were among 
the exclamations which greeted the display of two or 
three dozen of ill-thriven, ill-coloured dwarfs. The fact 
was that, from the want of a proper standard, having 
never in their lives seen “a good basket,” the people in 
that district did not know what a fair day’s fishing 
meant, in the signification which that phrase bears inthe 
happier regions of Tweed and her tributaries. And 
here let it be said in passing, that the violent differ- - 
ences between the number and condition of the trouts 
in the waters of different districts, between which no 
material difference—atmospheric, aquatic, or geologic, 
—is to be detected, is a matter regarding which less is ~ 
known, and, which does not necessarily follow, less 
has been said, than on almost any other point con- 
nected with angling. A similar confusion of tongues 
often arises in speaking of angling at different seasons : 
what is properly enough called good fishing in and 
