Ettrick Shepherd and Christopher North have lain, after copious toddy.
"'Tis gone, 'tis gone:" not in our time will any man, like the Ettrick
Shepherd, need a cart to carry the trout he has slain in Meggat Water.
That stream, flowing through a valley furnished with a grass-grown track
for a road, flows, as I said, into St. Mary's Loch. There are two or
three large pools at the foot of the loch, in which, as a small boy
hardly promoted to fly, I have seen many monsters rising greedily. Men
got into the way of fishing these pools after a flood with minnow, and
thereby made huge baskets, the big fish running up to feed, out of the
loch. But, when last I rowed past Meggat foot, the delta of that
historic stream was simply crowded with anglers, stepping in in front of
each other. I asked if this mob was a political "demonstration," but
they stuck to business, as if they had been on the Regent's Canal. And
this, remember, was twenty miles from any town! Yet there is a burn on
the Border still undiscovered, still full of greedy trout. I shall give
the angler such a hint of its whereabouts as Tiresias, in Hades, gave to
Odysseus concerning the end of his second wanderings.

When, O stranger, thou hast reached a burn where the shepherd asks thee
for the newspaper wrapped round thy sandwiches, that he may read the
news, then erect an altar to Priapus, god of fishermen, and begin to
angle boldly.

Probably the troops who fish our Border-burns still manage to toss out
some dozens of tiny fishes, some six or eight to the pound. Are not
these triumphs chronicled in the "Scotsman?" But they cannot imagine
what angling was in the dead years, nor what great trout dwelt below the
linns of the Crosscleugh burn, beneath the red clusters of the rowan
trees, or in the waters of the "Little Yarrow" above the Loch of the
Lowes. As to the lochs themselves, now that anyone may put a boat on