Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 333, July 1843Various
General
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 333, July 1843
Various
England -- Periodicals; Scotland -- Periodicals
excessive cold. Thus fry are longer of hatching in a severe winter, than
during an open one with little frost."
When salmon first ascend the Tweed, they are brown upon the back, fat,
and in high condition. During the prevalence of cold weather they lie in
deep and easy water, but as the season advances, they draw into the
great rough streams, taking up their stations where they are likely to
be least observed. But there the wily wand of the practiced angler casts
its gaudy lure, and "Kinmont Willie," "Michael Scott," or "The Lady of
Mertoun," (three killing flies,) darting deceitfully within their view,
a sudden lounge is made--sometimes scarcely visible by outward signs--as
often accompanied by a watery heave, and a flash like that of an aurora
borealis,--and downwards, upwards, onwards, a twenty-pounder darts away
with lightning speed, while the rapid reel gives out that heart-stirring
sound so musical to an angler's ear, and than which none accords so well
with the hoarser murmur of the brawling stream; till at last, after many
an alternate hope and fear, the glittering prize turns up his silvery
unresisting broadside, in meek submission to the merciless gaff.
Many otherwise well-principled persons believe that little more is
required in angling than the exercise of patience. Place a merely
patient man, acquainted only with pedestrian movements, upon a
strong-headed horse determined to win, and give him the start at a
steeple-chase, with Lord Waterford not far behind, and it will be seen
before he has crossed much country, where patience is always as useful
as it is praiseworthy. Place the same patient man, if he happens to have
been picked up alive, and eventually recovers, in the midst of a roaring
rock-bound river, and suppose him (a thing we confess, in his case, not
quite conceivable) to have hooked a twenty-pound salmon at the tail of
the stream, just where it subsides into some vast, almost fathomless,
and far-extended pool, and that the said salmon, being rather of a
restless disposition, and moreover somewhat disquieted by feeling an
unaccustomed barb in his cheek or tongue, takes his 300 yards down the
deep water at a single run, and then goes helter-skelter over a
cataract, which had occupied him most of the preceding Sunday to ascend,
after many a sinewy but unsuccessful spring! Will patience avail a man
any thing in such a predicament, when he ought rather to run like an
Arab, or dive like a dolphin, "splash, splash, towards the sea,"
notwithstanding the chance of his breaking his neck among the rocks, or
being drowned while trying to round a crag which he cannot clamber over?
Let us hear Mr Scrope's account of his third cast, one fine morning,
when he came to Kingswell Lees.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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