need go there now. The nets and other dismal devices of the poachers
from the towns have ruined that pleasant brook, where one has passed so
many a happy hour, walking the long way home wet and weary, but well
content. Into Aill flows a burn, the Headshaw burn, where there used to
be good fish, because it runs out of Headshaw Loch, a weed-fringed lonely
tarn on the bleak level of the tableland. Bleak as it may seem, Headshaw
Loch has the great charm of absolute solitude: there are no tourists nor
anglers here, and the life of the birds is especially free and charming.
The trout, too, are large, pink of flesh, and game of character; but the
world of mankind need not rush thither. They are not to be captured by
the wiles of men, or so rarely that the most enthusiastic anglers have
given them up. They are as safe in their tarn as those enchanted fish of
the "Arabian Nights." Perhaps a silver sedge in a warm twilight may
somewhat avail, but the adventure is rarely achieved.

These are the waters with which our boyhood was mainly engaged; it is a
pleasure to name and number them. Memory, that has lost so much and
would gladly lose so much more, brings vividly back the golden summer
evenings by Tweedside, when the trout began to plash in the
stillness--brings back the long, lounging, solitary days beneath the
woods of Ashiesteil--days so lonely that they sometimes, in the end,
begat a superstitious eeriness. One seemed forsaken in an enchanted
world; one might see the two white fairy deer flit by, bringing to us, as
to Thomas Rhymer, the tidings that we must back to Fairyland. Other
waters we knew well, and loved: the little salmon-stream in the west that
doubles through the loch, and runs a mile or twain beneath its alders,
past its old Celtic battle-field, beneath the ruined shell of its feudal
tower, to the sea. Many a happy day we had there, on loch or stream,
with the big sea-trout which have somehow changed their tastes, and to-
day take quite different flies from the green body and the red body that