there no way of getting him to see this and behave accordingly? The
gardener feared there was none. Meanwhile he sat on the bank and angled
in a pool. "Try my rod," he said, and, as soon as I had taken hold of
it, "pull up," he cried, "pull up." I did "pull up," and hauled my first
troutling on shore. But in my inmost heart I feared that he was not my
trout at all, that the gardener had hooked him before he handed the rod
to me. Then we met my younger brother coming to us with quite a great
fish, half a pound perhaps, which he had caught in a burn. Then, for the
first time, my soul knew the fierce passion of jealousy, the envy of the
angler. Almost for the last time, too; for, I know not why it is, and it
proves me no true fisherman, I am not discontented by the successes of
others. If one cannot catch fish oneself, surely the next best thing is
to see other people catch them.

My own progress was now checked for long by a constitutional and
insuperable aversion to angling with worm. If the gardener, or a pretty
girl-cousin of the mature age of fourteen, would put the worm on, I did
not "much mind" fishing with it. Dost thou remember, fair lady of the
ringlets? Still, I never liked bait-fishing, and these mine allies were
not always at hand. We used, indeed, to have great days with perch at
Faldonside, on the land which Sir Walter Scott was always so anxious to
buy from Mr. Nichol Milne. Almost the last entry in his diary, at
Naples, breathes this unutterable hope. He had deluded himself into
believing that his debts were paid, and that he could soon "speak a word
to young Nichol Milne." The word, of course, was never spoken, and the
unsupplanted laird used to let us fish for his perch to our hearts'
desire. Never was there such slaughter. The corks which we used as
floats were perpetually tipping, bobbing, and disappearing, and then the
red-finned perch would fly out on to dry land. Here I once saw two corks
go down, two anglers haul up, and one perch, attached to both hooks,