tired angler is far afloat on a sheet of glittering water will be greatly enjoyed. And prithee, good reader, for preference on such an expedition take a volume of old-fashioned poetry. A three-pound perch is a very good fish, and although a perch has been caught as heavy as five pounds, the angler need not expect to catch many of this size in a lifetime.

How different from this dolce far niente style of fishing is casting a fly on some large loch for a freshly run salmon or sea-trout! From this diversion the fisherman will assuredly return with aching back and arms which might have been racked; with dazzled eyes and blistered hands and tottering knees, and yet with a very contented heart, if his gillie bears a couple of salmon or half a dozen splendid sea-trout in silvery pride. What matters it if he finds himself so stiff that he can barely crawl to bed-to bed never more welcome? Sleep with ambrosial influence speedily creeps over him, and without lying late next morning, thanks to the salubrity of Scottish air, the sportsman finds himself invigorated and ready after breakfast for another day's fishing. This nobler kind of fishing, too (for we hold fly-fishing as superior to bait-fishing as the sunbeams are to moonlight, to say nothing of the nobler quarry which is pursued in this style of lochfishing), does not lightly pall upon its votaries. We cannot fancy for ourselves the pleasure of sitting two whole days in a windsor chair in a Thames punt to catch coarse fish ; but we would not envy others who can enjoy such a water frolic. Much of the difficulty of killing a salmon or sea-trout from the shore, when a man must throw a long line, is absent from loch-fishing, as there is no need to make an exceptionally long cast for a fish which will for the most part only be lying in one corner of a pool. Autumn is a favourable time for this sport, as salmon are travelling at that season to the outlets of the lochs, and of course a loch is best fished, like a river, when swollen with much rain. Mr. Colquhoun has some sensible remarks on this as on all Highland sports. The foundation of success in loch-fishing he deems to be a perfect local knowledge of the water. "In order to obtain this angling geography the lake should be surveyed in dry weather; and when the different feeding grounds are discovered, they should be noted by marks from different portions opposite to or crossing each other. A decayed stump of a tree exactly opposite a shepherd's hut, making a triangle with a rock or the end of a point, may be the only available beacons to guide you to a first-rate midloch cast." As for flies, the same author holds that the size and colour of loch-flies for salmon do not vary so much as those used in The Moor and the Loch (ed. 4, 1878), vol, ii. p. 314.

rivers. Red palmers, green bodies, and darker wings - these he thinks useful salmon flies for lochs. We agree again with him in his dictum that too much wind spoils loch-fishing more than too little. On Loch Ericht, for instance, it is not merely useless but dangerous to fish in a high wind, when the force of the air accumulates on the loch, being driven between high mountains as through a funnel, and a rough, swelling sea results. We have been on this loch in a gale of wind with a boatman who knew little or nothing of his business, and had it not been for reminiscences of rowing off the Devonshire coast we should almost certainly have been swamped. In such a gusty sea trout appear to lie at the bottom and do not care to rise.

The fishing on Loch Tay in February for salmon is frequently very good. It is distasteful to a fly-fisher, for it consists wholly in trolling with real or artificial minnow, but the results are almost sure to be excellent. Few waters hold so many "fish" as will Loch Tay in early spring, but the exposure and the rough weather which frequently prevail there at that season are very trying, unless a man possess a frame of iron and exceptional endurance. Playing a heavy salmon in a gale of wind during February with snow on all the hills and the thermometer considerably below freezing-point, is not altogether an unmixed pleasure. Warm garments, rugs, and well-filled flasks become under such circumstances a necessity, as the angler has merely to sit still while his boatmen row him up and down with two large rods set out at the stern, each holding a reel with co or 120 yards of line upon it and a phantom minnow, say, size No. 7, at the end, which is attached to it by a gut trace. Mr. Watson Lyall had four days' fishing upon Loch Tay at the very beginning of the season in 1877, and was exceptionally fortunate, as he took in that time 26 salmon of the weight of 551 lbs. More details of this loch and its fishing will be found in the same gentleman's Sportsman's Guide, which is published monthly during the season. As the value of fishing, like everything else, rises in proportion to its excellence, it is scarcely needful to add that salmon-fishing on Loch Tay, when hotels, boatmen, and the like are taken into account, is scarcely an amusement for a poor man. Moreover, it is somewhat of a lottery, productive though the loch is. For instance, a friend sought Loch Tay prepared to fish as long as 25. lasted. He caught one fish, exactly of 25 lbs. weight, for his money.

Although many of the Scotch lochs hold pike of respectable size, if not exactly equal to the monsters of Loch Corrib or Loch Mask, pike-fishing is not generally identified with angling in the Scotch lochs. The professors of this art are to be found mainly in the

London Angling Clubs or among the frequenters of the sluggish broads and muddy river bends of East Anglia. A pike is a heavypulling, dogged fish, being unlike the spirited and active members of the salmonide. Moreover, it is a foul-feeding fish and not much esteemed when it appears on the table. Bishop Thirlwall, indeed, regarded it as beyond the pale of human sympathy because it was a cannibal fond of eating its own kind; but then that tender-hearted man and scholar knew nothing probably of the nature of the trout. Indeed to men of his character, who are not aware of the shortcomings of trout in this respect, anglers had better hold their peace. Those who like fishing for this "tyrant of the fresh waters," as Walton calls the pike, should consult their Compleat Angler for the toothsome receipt which its writer gives for cooking a pike. The mere reading of it serves instead of a banquet, and if a man has a mind to try dinner with Duke Humphrey let him peruse this receipt and duly smack his lips over the aromatic flavours of thyme, sweet marjoram, winter savory, pickled oysters, anchovies, butter, claret, oranges, and other ingredients which he is here invited to taste in a pike "roasted very leisurely." No wonder that the patriarch adds, “This dish of meat is too good for any but anglers or very honest men." A pike so treated (or, we may add, a pair of old shoes) would indeed be ethereal. We could never stoop to troll for pike amid the trout of a northern loch, and, amazing though it must seem to the pike-fisher, would infinitely prefer catching a few small trout with artificial fly, to having runs innumerable with monster pike and filling the boat with booty which no one cares to eat. The mention of artificial flies, indeed, reminds us that it is possible in very windy weather to take pike with a so-called fly. This is more like a bird, say a glorified dab-chick, than a fly, just as a salmon fly rather resembles a gorgeous tropical insect than some of the numerous varieties of crustacea— shrimps, prawns, and the like—which it is supposed a salmon deems it. Take a huge hook, fasten on it plenty of richly coloured worsted with much peacock harl, wrap this all round with gold list and add the eye at the end of a peacock's feather for wings, and you will possess a pike fly. It may be a very fatal bait on certain days; but as a rule we believe it is but a precarious lure, depending as it does for its efficacy on the fact that with a north-west breeze a pike will almost eat anything.

Once more reverting to the nobler members of the great salmon family, the monarch of the great Scotch lochs, the Salmo ferox, at once claims attention. Multitudes of people go northwards annually ambitious of catching a monster specimen, and multitudes return with

their noble ambition unappeased. The fascination which the pursuit engenders arises from the fact that the fisherman on Loch Laggan, Awe, or Rannoch knows that he is being rowed over the haunts of this fish, and that it may take the artificial minnow, which is being towed astern to tempt it, at any moment. As day by day passes

on without success, the angler, determined not to be beaten, and after the manner of his kind persevering in the teeth of despair, only becomes more keen in his endeavours, being duly encouraged by his gillie's talk of monstrous specimens which Mr. A. or Major B. once took on this very loch, until time at length vanquishes him and he has to return to the ordinary duties of civilised life in the South. At least one gentleman whom we could name passes his whole summer in assiduous daily attempts to catch the wily Salmo ferox. Others give up grouse-shooting, deer-stalking, money- or even lovemaking for this fascinating pursuit. No angler is so near to a fanatic as the fisher for ferox; and we have known a Highland fishing hotel bear a perilous resemblance to a maison de santé at breakfast and dinner time when the votaries of this sport assembled. Ministers might fall or shares go up, empires rise, revolt or revolution stalk in blood and fire through the land, for all they cared about it. They had set their hearts on capturing a big ferox, and day after day and all day they slaved in blinding sunshine, the prey of numberless midges, while their hearts grew daily as dark as their countenances, till they had succeeded in their fell purpose. In after life such a maniac can afford to smile at his devotion to this long piraticallooking, pink and brown trout; but at the time the occupation is allabsorbing. Nothing is allowed to interfere with it; nothing can be thought of or named in comparison with this sport. At the end of the season the bulk of these fanatics return gloomy and unsatisfied homewards. A few lucky men carry away the skins of their captives wrapped up in folds of blotting paper steeped in carbolic acid, to hang up in their halls some months afterwards a misshaped, painted, and varnished monstrosity, which some taxidermist who never saw such a fish in the flesh, any more than a siren or mermaid, has the audacity to call a Salmo ferox.

We laugh; and yet we have been smitten in our time with this midsummer madness. Nay, were we beside one or two favourite Northern lochs, the nympholepsy would return, perhaps set in with greater intensity as the grey mountains, the nearer pastures, or scanty crop of oats, won from the devouring grasp of heather, the fringe of graceful reeds, above all the breadths of shining water, shimmering beyond the rocky point under a stiff breeze, met the eye, and the old

1

love woke again within the heart. Before catching a ferox, however, comes the question, what is a ferox? Is it a separate species, or merely (as almost all keepers and gillies in Scotland affirm) an overgrown variety of the common trout? The Thames trout, for instance, is not a different species from the common English brown trout, S. fario. What can be said when a practical fisherman states his belief that, in the same manner, a ferox is either an exaggerated variety of the common lake-trout, an overgrown and old specimen of it, or a seatrout which has given up migration, much as in the "Water Babies" the salmon reproaches the common trout for doing, and has therefore grown old, fat, and lazy? To make the confusion worse, Mr. Colquhoun (the highest authority on fishing for ferox) states that many big feroxes are often found to be salmon kelts. Mr. Stoddart would even lower the ferox, with his fine appetite for fish, to a tame companion of the carp, and have us believe that it is fond of grazing on grass and weeds. Yarrell does not accurately discriminate between the common trout and this fish; making the fin rays the same in number in each, save that the ferox possesses 13 instead of 14 dorsal rays like the other. Günther gives the ferox more vertebræ but fewer pyloric appendages than the common trout; adding that its great characteristic seems to be "the crescent-shaped preoperculum with the hinder and lower margins passing into each other without forming an angle."2 It may therefore be concluded that the ferox is a distinct species, whatever Scotch fishermen may say; theirs by no means being a solitary instance of ignorance barking like a cur at science, to use an expression of Plato. With regard to the size which this fish attains, Mr. Colquhoun states that in 28 years of his life he has known three to have been taken in Loch Rannoch of the respective weights of 23, 22, and 20 lbs. This sportsman thinks the reason why so few large feroxes (or feroces) are taken to be that they are so frequently pricked and terrified with the constant trolling of phantom minnows and "those villainous spoons" over them. Little specimens will occasionally take a trout fly, he says, but seldom or never the larger ones. On Loch Laggan we heard of a keeper taking several small ones with a Cardinal fly, a gorgeous production wholly crimson with plenty of gold tinsel twisted on it. A man might, however, as an ordinary thing as well hope to make ropes out of the sand on the edge of the loch as catch the feroxes in it with fly. Some authorities recommend a natural minnow, some a steady reliance on Brown's phantom. Our opinion is that an angler should in the first In the Field paper, Nov. 13, 1880.

2

Catalogue of the Fishes in the British Museum, vol, vi, Salmonida, 1866,