PREFATORY NOTE, xf 
another famous angler (and politician), alas! no niore— 
the Johnson of Scotland, as he was well called—I mean 
Alex. Russel, Editor of the Scotsman, and author of the 
book of ‘The Salmon.’ He and Stewart were two 
of the finest fishermen that it has ever been my lot 
to know, and I loved them both well—for ‘like and 
difference, as Mrs. Browning puts it—though Stewart 
was very wroth with me afterwards and devoted a 
whole pamphlet to my annihilation, pugnacious ‘ moss- 
trooping Scot’ as he was.... No reason that, how- 
ever, why I should not write his epitaph in the /zeld 
when he died ... 
I'd give the lands of Deloraine 
Stout Musgrave were alive again! ... 
But, some one asks ‘Why do you not practise 
what you preach? You eulogise monographs, and you 
write books yourself which embrace every variety of 
angling and “ fishey lore” from bait-breeding to salmon- 
catching.’ 
Dear critic (forgive the adjective when perhaps you 
are in the very act of sharpening your ‘ scalping-knife’), 
I do nothing of the sort; and though it is true I have 
‘graduated’ in most kinds of fishing, from sticklebacks 
upwards, there are many subjects germane to angling, 
such as fish-rearing—both of Salmonide and ‘coarse’ 
fish—fish-acclimatisation, and several special depart- 
ments of angling itself, where I have need to learn 
rather than to pretend to teach. Consequently I have 
theught myself fortunate to be able to secure for these 
