A fisher, says our father Izaak, is like a poet: he "must be born so."
The majority of dwellers on the Border are born to be fishers, thanks to
the endless number of rivers and burns in the region between the Tweed
and the Coquet--a realm where almost all trout-fishing is open, and
where, since population and love of the sport have increased, there is
now but little water that merits the trouble of putting up a rod.

Like the rest of us in that country, I was born an angler, though under
an evil star, for, indeed, my labours have not been blessed, and are
devoted to fishing rather than to the catching of fish. Remembrance can
scarcely recover, "nor time bring back to time," the days when I was not
busy at the waterside; yet the feat is not quite beyond the power of
Mnemosyne. My first recollection of the sport must date from about the
age of four. I recall, in a dim brightness, driving along a road that
ran between banks of bracken and mica-veined rocks, and the sunlight on a
shining bend of a highland stream, and my father, standing in the shallow
water, showing me a huge yellow fish, that gave its last fling or two on
the grassy bank. The fish seemed as terrible and dangerous to me as to
Tobit, in the Apocrypha, did that ferocious half-pounder which he carries
on a string in the early Italian pictures. How oddly Botticelli and his
brethren misconceived the man-devouring fish, which must have been a
crocodile strayed from the Nile into the waters of the Euphrates! A half-
pounder! To have been terrified by a trout seems a bad beginning; and,
thereafter, the mist gather's over the past, only to lift again when I
see myself, with a crowd of other little children, sent to fish, with
crooked pins, for minnows, or "baggies" as we called them, in the
Ettrick. If our parents hoped that we would bring home minnows for bait,
they were disappointed. The party was under the command of a nursery