governess, and probably she was no descendant of the mother of us all,
Dame Juliana Berners. We did not catch any minnows, and I remember
sitting to watch a bigger boy, who was angling in a shoal of them when a
parr came into the shoal, and we had bright visions of alluring that
monarch of the deep. But the parr disdained our baits, and for months I
dreamed of what it would have been to capture him, and often thought of
him in church. In a moment of profane confidence my younger brother once
asked me: "What do _you_ do in sermon time? I," said he in a
whisper--"mind you don't tell--_I_ tell stories to myself about catching
trout." To which I added similar confession, for even so I drove the
sermon by, and I have not "told"--till now.

By this time we must have been introduced to trout. Who forgets his
first trout? Mine, thanks to that unlucky star, was a double deception,
or rather there were two kinds of deception. A village carpenter very
kindly made rods for us. They were of unpainted wood, these first rods;
they were in two pieces, with a real brass joint, and there was a ring at
the end of the top joint, to which the line was knotted. We were still
in the age of Walton, who clearly knew nothing, except by hearsay, of a
reel; he abandons the attempt to describe that machine as used by the
salmon-fishers. He thinks it must be seen to be understood. With these
innocent weapons, and with the gardener to bait our hooks, we were taken
to the Yarrow, far up the stream, near Ladhope. How well one remembers
deserting the gardener, and already appreciating the joys of having no
gillie nor attendant, of being "alone with ourselves and the goddess of
fishing"! I cast away as well as I could, and presently jerked a trout,
a tiny one, high up in the air out of the water. But he fell off the
hook again, he dropped in with a little splash, and I rushed up to
consult my tutor on his unsportsmanlike behaviour, and the disappointing,
nay, heart-breaking, occurrence. Was the trout not morally caught, was