"Now," I said when the purchase was completed, "about the fishing." 66 I speak in metaphor. Among as it happened, very useful the admirable devices included they proved to be. in my fly-book for securing flies (I may mention that it was an expensive book) there is a sheet of ivory (it couldn't be celluloid at the price) with aluminium clips. Here repose a dozen Scotch loch-flies. I bought them from a tackledealer at a certain tourist resort in the Western Highlands. I had no intention of buying them, in the first place. I entered the shop in search of information as to the nearest free fishing. "Ah!" said the gentleman behind the counter grimly, as one who had learned life's hardest lesson-that nothing in this world is free, that all things save death must be bought at a price. "Ah! Fr-r-ree, d'ye say? "Free, I repeated firmly, "Ah!" he said again, but He Weel, maybe ye'll find yoursel' on a loch. Ye'll be needin' the right sort o' flee there." He eyed me over his spectacles like a chess-player who has cornered his opponent's queen. I capitulated and bought what he suggested, and, Ou, aye. The feeshin'. Weel, there'll be a bonny bit stream about six miles awa'. It's no what ye'd ca' fr-r-re in the strict sense o' the world; but go ye an' feesh there, laddie, an' if anybody asks ye by whose leave ye are on the watter, say it was by my leave." He described the whereabouts of the burn, and I thanked him gratefully (being, as I say, young then), and departed on my quest. I had no difficulty in finding that bonny bit stream. It ran from a loch to the sea. This is, I know, a peculiarity of a great many streams. But what I mean is that the scenery included both loch and sea, with my ship lying at anchor in the middle distance. I could have dispensed with the latter as an adjunct to the view; I like to forget the Navy when I am ashore. I put up my rod and commenced fishing with a light heart. Just when I reached the nearest point to some lodge gates I caught a small trout, and in the act of transferring it to my basket I saw a man and a girl pass through the gates and stand as if rooted to the spot. With an unpleasant feeling in the pit of my stomach I resumed operations, and out of the corner of my eye ob then, "I'm afraid not. We only anchored this morning." "Anchored?' His eyes again wandered seaward, and lit on the cruiser anchored in the bay. His expression changed. "Do you belong to "Has anybody given you her?" he asked, jerking his leave to fish this water? I tried to throw back my est head, but failed. A young man with a fair moustache and angry eyes stood glaring at me. "Yes," I said, my admirafor the courage of all poachers growing as I spoke. I can't remember his name, bthough. It was the johnnie Oition ip who sells flies in the town. He head at my "ship or place of duty." "Yes." I felt somehow that this only made matters worse. A nice how-d'ye-do if he wrote to the captain. "Then why the deuce didn't you say so before, man alive! Go on and fish as much as you like." He glanced at his watch. "But it's tea-time. Come along distant has a black beard and spec- and have a cup of tea with my sed tacles. He gave me leave to wife first." Just earest p fish here." man. "" cheek! The damned imHe had forgotten me, and was staring to sea. "By Jingo! out I'll in the a baster I I was ignorant of the etiquette the detected poacher, but it seemed to me that something ought to be done about the lone trout reposing on a lot of fern my basket. I proffered it him. The pitf med pepto the comer It was, of course as the science master in the Britannia used to say of our mathematics, clearly all wrong. That sort of thing merely puts a premium on poaching. I went back to my ship that evening with an invitation to return the following day and bring anybody who cared to come and fish a remote private loch somewhere in the mountains, stocked with rainbow trout. It turned out to be a pretty stiff ramble of about seven miles on which we embarked in company with a ghillie. He at a time. Zulu, butcher, was a grave silent man, who heckham-peckham, it was all walked at a steady lope of five miles an hour, without so much as a glance over his shoulder at the two crimson-faced breathless figures stumbling grimly in his wake. It was not a propitious time for admiring scenery, but that wild Highland landscape with the shafts of watery sunlight piercing the cloud-wreaths that floated about the gaunt flanks of the mountains, the groups of suspicious cattle watching us from beneath their shaggy brows, the thin persistent call of the plover, and the music of a burn hungry for its tryst with the sea, combine in one ineffaceable memory. We reached the little loch at length, a stretch of shallow water held between the clouds and the tops of the mountains like a drinking goblet of the gods raised in some Olympian pledge. And here we experienced the perfect day, said to be granted once and once only in a lifetime to all fishermen. A thunderstorm broke over us shortly after we commenced fishing. The thunder reverberated among the valleys beneath us like a bombardment; the lightning snickered in violet streaks about our ears. the trout, the fighting rainbow trout, went stark raving mad. We were fishing with three flies each, and they rushed at them and were hooked three And one to them as long as they could dash at the fly and grab it. A rise of mayfly on the Kennet was a sluggish proceeding by comparison with that hectic afternoon, and when at last, glutted with slaughter, we desisted, it was only out of consideration for the return journey and the weight of fish to be carried. We dined with our host and hostess when we returned; to crown the day's achievement fittingly, the former had decanted a bottle of superlative port, and we sat in the candlelight beneath the dark portraits of kilted ancestors and talked of many things. The conversation touched finally on ghosts, familiar apparitions, it seemed, in that old house. Our fair young hostess, with her elbows resting on the polished surface of the table reflecting little pools of candle-light, spoke of the family spectres with the pride and affection with which one recalls the traits of old retainers. It was late when we finally departed, wheeling our bicycles down the dark avenue crossed at intervals by shafts of moon. light falling through the trees. Our heads were humming with stories of the supernatural, and presently my companion ob served, "I'd rather like to see that white lady with her head under her arm; wouldn't you? ly. 66 Yes," I agreed, pot-valiantIt was in the avenue a bo are Welsh poacher. thing! Appare old b Ostes on the p table candy ily gre d affect The most beautifully tied, and, on their water, the most effective flies in the collection came into existence between the scarred and horny foreat finger and thumb of an old He was by profession a furnaceman in a ched large tin-plate works; but because his leisure hours from February to September saw him encased to the hips in rubber waders, he was known locally as Toom Sarni-Tom the Stocking. He lived in a two-roomed cottage down by the bank of what had once been a glorious trout-stream, which the advancing tide of factories setting up the valley, and the growth of the village into a straggling industrial town, had changed into a polluted trickle of soap-suds meandering amid empty tins, ashes, and household garbage. Yet Tom contrived to catch trout there, and after a drop of rain his was a familiar figure moving about the sorry stream with his old spliced rod, watched by the knot of loafers who alls the Late whee e dart als ling by ds wer the spe IV. recently expressed ambition was about to be gratified. "Well, anyhow," said P rather irrelevantly, "that was a dam' good drop of port. Let's go and investigate." We pushed our bicycles forward, and presently came upon a white donkey standing forlornly by the side of the avenue, sunk in a profound abstraction.. leaned against the parapet of the bridge. He invariably wore a rusty bowler hat entwined with casts when employed upon the serious business of fishing. I call him a poacher, but no member of the Flyfisher's Club was more punctilious as to the orthodoxy of his methods. He never used anything but a fly, and the only reason I have for so describing him was that he shared a tendency with the hero of a certain nursery rhyme to catch fishes in other men's ditches. The local landowners, in acknowledgment of his scrupulous sportsmanship (he was also deacon of a local Bethseda or chapel), eventually gave him permission to fish their rivers to the end of his days. He was a born naturalist, and taught himself to read quite late in life in order, as far as I could see, to work himself into a passion over the misstatements of recognised authorities on nature. My mother made him free of the library, and he perused, volume by volume, Buckland's 'Curiosities of Natural History' with a zest not always free from scorn. It was during the progress of this literary activity that a maid came into the smokingroom one evening with the announcement that Tom Jones was just then in the kitchen wishing to speak to me. I went out into the oldfashioned stone-flagged kitchen of my boyhood's home, where flitches of bacon and bunches of herbs hung from the lofty ceiling, and the hearth was girdled by whorls of whitewash laid in an unchanging design that was probably a survival of ancient runes; where the lamp-light was reflected from the burnished warming-pans and brass spits that were the pride of the old cook's heart, and against the wall a pendulum clock ticked measure for measure with eternity. Here round the lamp on a circular table the maids sat drinking stewed tea, while the old cowman, ignoring their gossip, pored over Welsh Bible in his corner by the fire. On a chair by the door, the prehistoric bowler-hat between his knees, holding a little aloof from the domestic thraldom of the others, sat Tom the Stocking. "I wass bringin' back the book the mishtress lent me," he explained as he rose, extending the volume carefully wrapped in newspaper. "An' indeed, sir, that gentleman don't know nothin' at all whateffer about the larva of the rose And peering up into my face through cracked steel-rimmed spectacles, the old man plunged breathlessly, in a strange jargon of Welsh and English, into the life-history of the rose beetle, according to his observations in that once beautiful valley of South Wales which indus trialism was invading with smoke-grimed claws-and I haven't a doubt that he was right. Another memory of him returns to me. I was going to fish a well-known stream about twenty miles away, and was in the little waiting-room of the station, buying my ticket, when I became aware of Toom Sarni in his best blacks setting off to the only relaxation besides fishing he ever permitted himself-a funeral. self-a funeral. He sidled to my elbow, and said in a hoarse whisper, "Let me see your flies, man.' There was always in our relations with one an other that hint of the mysteri ous which his whisper implied. I showed him what Mr Hardy of Pall Mall and Alnwick considered suitable to the river and the occasion. No good! was his comment. 'Wait, nowtrain was signalled as he spoke; from a waistcoat pocket he produced gut and a hook, which he transferred to his mouth; from other places of concealment he whipped heavy-bladed knife, a bit of silk, and a scrap of fur. Before the train had drawn to a stand |