lowness of the water and the advance of summer. {7}

Our ancestors, apparently, used only one fly at a time; in rapid rivers,
with wet fly, two, three, or, in lochs like Loch Leven, even four are
employed. To my mind more than two only cause entanglements of the
tackle. The old English anglers knew, of course, little or nothing of
loch fishing, using bait in lakes. The great length of their rods made
reels less necessary, and they do not seem to have waded much. A modern
angler, casting upwards, from the middle of the stream, with a nine-foot
rod, would have astonished Walton. They dealt with trout less educated
than ours, and tooled with much coarser and heavier implements. They had
no fine scruples about bait of every kind, any more than the Scots have,
and Barker loved a lob-worm, fished on the surface, in a dark night. He
was a pot-fisher, and had been a cook. He could catch a huge basket of
trout, and dress them in many different ways,--broyled, calvored hot with
antchovaes sauce, boyled, soused, stewed, fried, battered with eggs,
roasted, baked, calvored cold, and marilled, or potted, also marrionated.
Barker instructs my Lord Montague to fish with salmon roe, a thing
prohibited and very popular in Scotland. 'If I had known it but twenty
years agoe, I would have gained a hundred pounds onely with that bait. I
am bound in duty to divulge it to your Honour, and not to carry it to my
grave with me. I do desire that men of quality should have it that
delight in that pleasure: the greedy angler will murmur at me, but for
that I care not.' Barker calls salmon roe 'an experience I have found of
late: the best bait for a trout that I have seen in all my time,' and it
is the most deadly, in the eddy of a turbid water. Perhaps trout would
take caviare, which is not forbidden by the law of the land. Any
unscrupulous person may make the experiment, and argue the matter out
with the water-bailie. But, in my country, it is more usual to duck that
official, and go on netting, sniggling, salmon-roeing, and destroying