heavy fish when a messenger came to tell him of the sudden and serious illness of his wife. The fisherman, reasoning that his wife might recover, but that he was never likely to get hold of such a monstrous specimen of the Salar tribe again, could not bring himself to loose his hold, so sent for further tidings. "The mistress is dying," was the answer: but the laird now saw that he was engaged in a struggle with such a creature as Tweedside in all its history had never seen the like of, and again he hardened his heart; and it was only when he heard that all was over that he reluctantly broke, and went up to the house. "She was a good wife to you, laird!" cried a weeping and sympathising retainer. "Ay, she was that, Jeanie, she was a' that!" said the disconsolate widower; "but eb, woman! yon was the varra mucklest fish that eyes of man ever yet saw on Tweed!"

The crofter felt something like the old laird: he had not seen the fish, beyond the merest glimpse of it as it slowly walloped away out into the stream after being hooked, but he judged from the weight put on his hand and arm, and from the strain on the rod, that if it were only once on the bank, good kipper to eat with his porridge would be plentiful in his house for many a day to come. Always provided and this was indeed a very large "if" -no one prevented him carrying it off when it was landed. So in a swither of discomfiture and uncertainty Archie played his fish for five or ten minutes, and then, unable to bear the silence any longer, cried out to the man on the other shore

"It's a fine day this!" "It'll be a day you'll be wishing it was night, before I've done wi'

ye!" was the grim answer that came back, and Archie almost fell into the river at the response.

"It'll be a bad day's work for me this!" he cried out almost in a whine.

"It'll be all that, my man!" replied the keeper, cheerfully.

The fish, so passive hitherto, had behaved as large fish often do behave, he had shown no hurry or undignified alarm. The disagreeable thing he had got into his mouth would soon be swallowed or spat out. So he sailed up and down the pool, unwilling to allow that there was any force guiding or compelling him from above. Then all of a sudden he got irritated, and made a furious rush across and down the stream without breaking water. The stiff unoiled reel screeched as it had never done before, and a red streak ran up the man's thumb as the coarse horse-hair line cut it almost to the bone. The salmon nearly ran aground in the shoaling water on the keeper's side, and then turned and went up the stream again, and the latter saw the great white belly flash under the thin water as the mighty rudder of a tail twisted it round as on a pivot. Something like five feet of blue-brown back came shooting up the pool close to the bank, and then disappeared like a ghost in the deep stream above. Archie thought he had hold of a prize, but the other knew it, and his experienced eye told him that he had just seen the heaviest salmon which had ever come into his ken either in or out of the Awe. "By- he is a fish!" he cried to himself, as with straining straining eyes he followed the wake in the water.

Great, indeed, was this keeper's wrath and indignation. It was bad enough that this poaching

crofter should be at the river at all, but that he should fall on such a piece of luck as this was almost more than mortal man could bear. It made matters still worse for the spectator to think that he had been sitting for half an hour within twenty yards of the fish, and might have been playing him himself - if only he had known. The thought flashed through his brain that perhaps this was the way in which he was to be punished for the elaborate manoeuvre by which MacCorquodale had been decoyed to the river.

If Rory MacGilp was miserable, Archibald was in a much more parlous state. He would have felt very diffident at working a salmon before this keeper's critical eye under the most favourable and lawful circumstances, and to do justice to himself he would require the ever-ready help of a thorough ly sympathetic friend. Indeed it would be incorrect to speak at this period of the fish as a captive. Archie was the captive: the creature did what it liked with him; moved up and down the slack - water just as it chose; stopped and sank, and dug its nose down into the bottom when it wanted without asking any leave from the man on the bank. If such things were to be done in the green tree, what might be expected in the dry? if the salmon was all-powerful in the smooth, quiet pool, what would be his proceedings when he went seawards -into the wild rapids, and among the dangerous sunken rocks down the stream? Archie felt he would go down sooner or later-it was merely a question of time; and the perspiration poured from his forehead, his legs shook, and his hands trembled as he moved to and fro

Whether

along the grassy bank. he landed it, or whether it broke him, the end would be the same; certainly this time the offence would not be overlooked: he might say farewell to Barrachander, and bonnie Loch Tromlie, and green primrose-haunted Glen Nant.

The fish moved down to the tail of the pool, and sank himself there; he got his nose up-stream, and began to "jig" at the line, each jig taking him a little farther down, and each vibration communicating a dreadful shock to the heart of the man above. five minutes," thought Archie, "I'll be likely a mile down, with my rod broken, and that old heathen grinning at me!" Oh, for a friend now!

"In

"Rory!" he cried out softly to his enemy-"Rory!" But no answer came back across the water. Rory sat like a carved statue on his rock.

"Mr MacGilp!-my fingers is cut to the quick! Will ye no pitch a stone in below him and turn him up?" Still there was no answer. "My back's fairly broken!" cried Archie, piteously.

"I'm right glad to hear it, roared back the keeper-" of that same back!"

"He's forty pound weight!" cried Archie, appealingly.

"HE'S SIXTY!" screamed Rory, jumping off his rock, and dancing about on the bank. "You poaching deevil! I hope he'll break your neck and drown you afterwards!"

Oh-what'll I do if he goes down?" howled the other man; "he's off-he's off-what'll I do if he goes down?"

The fish lay now on the top of the rapid stream, furiously flapping his tail.

"Give him line!" shouted Rory, "you great !" "But what am I doing?" he cried to himself. "Let him break-I hope he will!" Archie lowered the point of his rod, and the fish-as they so often will-stopped at the strain being taken off. But he was too far down to get back,-foot by foot he walloped down; he was fairly out of the pool, he got into the stream, he struggled against it for a moment, and the next he was raging away down the river: now deep down in it, now showing his huge breadth of tail at the top, turning over and over like a porpoise, careless where he went so long as he got clear.

Archie stood in the old place on the bank with his mouth open and most of his hundred yards of line run out, as incapable of checking its movements as if it had been a hundredweight of iron.

"Follow him! follow him!" roared Rory, forgetting himself again. "Keep him in But let him alone, you fool!" was again his second thought; "let him be! he'll never get by the point!" The keeper ran down the bank, hopping lightly over the boulders, and never taking his eye off the bit of foaming water where he judged the runaway to be; and Archie, his first stupefaction over, did the same, and got a slight pull on the salmon some two hundred yards farther down.

Rory, when coming up in the morning, had left his rod here, and now got possession of it, and of his gaff, which latter he slung over his back. A little lower the river turned, and the two men and the fish followed the curve, and got the last at any rate-into bad bit of rock-protected stream, dangerous enough now, though

VOL. CLXI.-NO. DCCCCLXXIX.

What

much worse in low water. ever knowledge the fisherman had of the place was clean driven out of him by the agitation he was in, and it would have been purely by luck, and not by any sort of guidance, that he would have found a safe passage through. But every inch of the passage was known to the other: every rock and shoal was as clearly photographed on his mind as if it lay before him in bodily shape; the information which for fifty years had slowly percolated to his brain was complete; his hands twitched and his heart leapt when he saw the salmon make for a bad bit of water, and he was quite unable to stop himself from shouting out directions, though all the time he was heartily hoping that the fish would break his hold. The advice, which was plentifully accompanied with abuse of Archie, was always immediately followed by denunciation of himself-the giver of it.

"Keep your rod west and bring him in!" roared the keeper; "are ye no' seeing the muckle rock there?"-the said rock being at the time six feet under water. Then to himself, "Whisht, you old fool, and let him cut!" "Let him come in my side, you black thief!" he thundered again, "or he'll be round yon stob!"" and I hope he will, and be damned to him! If it isn't enough to sicken a fox to see him wi' such a fish as that!"

By this time Archie had got three-quarters of a mile down the river, and was much more exhausted than the fish. What with keeping a tight hold on it when sulking, and hopping among slippery smooth rocks and stones when it was lively, listening to the threatening advice from the other side-the penalty, moreover, which

3 B

he would have to pay for his sport ever being present in his mindhe thought he had never had such a time of it since he was born, and felt that the hardest day's work he had ever done was child's play to what he was going through.

"If I was only quit of this cursed fish for good and all!" he now thought to himself; "ay, if I was lying on my back wi' lumbago like Johnnie Ross, as I was pittyin' sae much!"

The playing of a salmon is not often monotonous, and is sometimes exciting in the very highest degree, but, alas! how hopeless a task it is to attempt to communicate the exhilaration by written words! The reel "screeches" or "whirrs," according as it is welloiled, or a rusty implement like our poacher's. The line "cuts the water," the gaff "went with a soft plunge" into the thick back. "Fresh up from the sea with the lice on him." All these words are appropriate and expressive, and they have been used over and over again hundreds and hundreds of times; scarce an account of a day's salmon-fishing is complete without them. The horrid vibration of the line as a big fish "jigs" at it, and every thrill runs like an electric shock right into the very heart of the rod-holder, has been referred to in almost every account of a tussle with a heavy salmon. How stale the words are! how difficult to put in fresher or better ones! and yet how very freshly every individual shock comes home in practice! Each jig you think will be the last -will find out the weak place in the hold, or the gear, and he will be off. We were once playing a big salmon in a very heavy rough pool he was nearly done, and was being slowly wound up to the gaflsman kneeling in front, when

he gave two or three horrid wriggles and slipped off the hook. The heavy stream kept the line pretty tight, and the other man never noticed what had happened, or that the rod-top was straight. We suddenly jerked the fly out of the water, right in front of him, as if preparing to make a new cast, and we shall never forget his face as he turned round and stared at us. And we would not like to put down here what he said. But what language-what eloquence could do justice to such a two minutes' incident in life!

What a cold blooded animal must that acquaintance of Mr Stoddart's have been who considered the hooking of a fish to be the only thing worth accomplishing, and who was accustomed then to "hand the rod to an attendant,” to spare himself what he was pleased to call the "drudgery" of playing it! How easily might a master of the English language utterly fail to convey to his audience almost any part of the effect produced on him at times when playing a great salmon in a wide, rough, rock-sprinkled river! He has him well on-the fish of the season-the fish of many seasons -perhaps of his life. The next hour will see him the happiest or the most miserable of men. Think of the feelings of the late Mr Dennison-not a novice but a fine fisherman-when, after eight hours' work on the Ness, the handle of his reel caught in his watch-chain, and the salmon broke him-the salmon of his life escaped! Grilse must get off at times, and ten, and twenty, and even thirty pounders, but surely monsters ought not to be allowed to escape and make a man's life a howling desolation for a week, with a mournful reminiscence attached to it ever after

wards. The very magnitude of such calamities sometimes makes people preternaturally calm: we have seen a friend, not remark able for extreme moderation in his language, reel up the late tightly held, and now merely dancing, fly after a long fruitlessly ending battle, without saying a word. Like the man who, pulling up at the top of a long hill, looked back and saw the flour which ought to have been in his cart whitening it for a mile-he was not equal to it. Often fish escape through no fault of the fisherman, often through his want of skill, but what when the loss is to be put down to pure carelessness? Think of the feelings of those hapless beings—we heard of another of them the other day—who, when putting the line on the reel, omit to fasten the one to the other, and see the salmon go off with the eighteenth part of a mile of cord trailing behind him! The last victim of this sort we know of was standing on a bridge and couldn't follow. John Bright is said to have taken a header after a line so disappearing.

On a big river a man will have 120 yards of line on his reel : seldom, indeed, will he require the whole of this. But if even eighty yards are run out the fish is a long way from you, and with a strong wind blowing down the stream it is very difficult to know what strain you are putting on the tackle. What a moment is that when at such a distance-a salmon suddenly turns and comes back at you, with every chance in his favour of shaking out a lightholding hook, or getting round a rock or tree! What a dreadful sight is a big salmon jumping just opposite you, when your line lies in a huge drowned bag far below you both! worse than jiggering or

anything else that! There is a good illustration of what we mean in a plate in Scrope's' Days and Nights of Salmon-Fishing,' but the angler looks singularly calm for such an emergency.

At six o'clock Archie rose his fish; at half-past eight he was more than a mile down the river, pretty well beaten. He had passed through all the mental phases we have spoken of-apprehension, hope, and deadly fear; and now, after all this manœuvring, it seemed as if the end had come, and he would be able to reel up-what he had left-and go home to make arrangements for his "flitting." The fish made a wild rush up the river, turned above a big upstanding stone, and then swam slowly down again. The line touched the stone, and Archie could not clear it; the surface was smooth, and it still ran a little, but the end was near: unless the salmon at once retraced his path, he was a free salmon soon.

Up

A good spring landed Rory out on a green-topped slippery boulder with twelve inches of water running over it. He heard the reel opposite give out its contents in sudden uncertain jerks; he caught sight of a huge bar of yellowishwhite coming wobbling down towards him-lost it-saw it again, and delivered his stroke. came the great, wriggling, curling mass-bright silver now-out of the river: with both hands close to the gaff head, he half lifted, half dragged the fish to shore, struggling, and all but losing his footing in the passage; then up the bank with it till he was able to lie down on it and get his hand into its gills.

Twenty minutes later Archie, with a sinking heart, had crossed the bridge of Awe and travelled