26 ANGLING SKETCHES 



and there with ruinedBorder towers — like Elibank, 

 the houses of Muckle Mou'ed Meg ; or with fair 

 baronial houses like Fernilea. Meg made a 

 bad exchange when she left Elibank with the 

 salmon pool at its foot for bleak Harden, 

 frowning over the narrow ' den ' where Harden 

 kept the plundered cattle. There is no fishing in 

 the tiny Harden burn, that joins the brawling 

 Borthwick Water. 



The burns of the Lowlands are now almost 

 barren of trout. The spawning fish, flabby and 

 useless, are killed in winter. All through the rest 

 of the year, in the remotest places, tourists are 

 hard at them with worm. In a small burn a 

 skilled wormer may almost depopulate the pools, 

 and, on the Border, all Is fish that comes to the 

 hook ; men keep the very fingerlings, on the pre- 

 text that they are ' so sweet ' in the frying-pan. 

 The crowd of anglers in glens which seem not 

 easily accessible is provoking enough. Into the 

 Meggat, a stream which feeds St. Mary's Loch, 

 there flows the Glengaber, or Glencaber burn : the 

 burn of the pine-tree stump. The water runs in 



