Such a twenty-miles digression from the South Inch implies how little there is to say about it. Now let us take a dander up the larger North Inch, Perth’s Campus Martius, at once promenade, race-course, review ground, grazing common, washing green, golf links, cricket-field, and area for unfenced football games in which, summer and winter, young Scots learn betimes to earn gate-money for English clubs. Opposite the Perth Academy appears to have been the arena where that early professional, Hal o’ the Wynd, played up so well in the deadly match by which the Clan Kay and the Clan Chattan enacted the less authentic tragedy of the Kilkenny cats. This spacious playground is now edged by a neat walk, which makes the constitutional round of sedate citizens, who on the safe riverside have the spectacle of pleasure boating against the difficulties of a strong stream and shallow rapids, and of the pulling of salmon nets in the season. Here a barelegged laddie, with the rudest tackle, has been known to hook a 30-lb. fish, holding on to the monster for two hours till some men helped him out with his fortune. The salmon of the Tay, reared in the Stormontfield Ponds above Perth, are famous for size, a weight of over 70 lbs. being not unknown; and cavillers on other streams cannot belittle its bigger fish by the sneer of “bigger liars there!” The keeping of fish in ice, and railway communications, have much enhanced the price, to the astonishment of a Highland laird who in a London tavern ordered a steak for himself and a “salmon for Donald” without guessing that his henchman’s meal must be paid for in gold as his own in silver. The old story of masters contracting not to feed their servants on salmon more than twice a week, is told, by Ruskin for one, of Tayside as of other river-lands. But so masterful are the demands of London now, that salmon may sometimes be dearer on the banks of the Tay than in the glutted metropolitan market. The Tay has another treasure, for now and then valuable pearls have been fished out of it by boys who, in a dry summer, can wade across its shallows just above the old bridge. A very different sight might be seen here when the river was frozen across and roughened by a jam of miniature icebergs.