A BORDER BOYHOOD ii 



Like the rest of us in that country, I was born 

 an angler, though under an evil star, for, indeed, 

 my labours have not been blessed, and are devoted 

 to fishing rather than to the catching of fish. Re- 

 membrance can scarcely recover, ' nor time bring 

 , back to time,' the days when I was not busy at the 

 waterside ; yet the feat is not quite beyond the 

 power of Mnemosyne. My first recollection of the 

 sport must date from about the age of four. I 

 recall, in a dim brightness, driving along a road 

 that ran between banks of bracken and mica- 

 veined rocks, and the sunlight on a shining bend 

 of a highland stream, and my father, standing in 

 the shallow water, showing me a huge yellow fish, 

 that gave its last fling or two on the grassy bank. 

 The fish seemed as terrible and dangerous to me 

 as to Tobit, in the Apocrypha, did that ferocious 

 half-pounder which he carries on a string in the 

 early Italian pictures. How oddly Botticelli and 

 his brethren misconceived the man-devouring fish, 

 which must have been a crocodile strayed from the 

 Nile into the waters of the Euphrates ! A half- 

 pounder ! To have been terrified by a trout 



