"What you want first of all," said he, "is to regulate the water-supply. At present when I go to a salmon-river, one of two things is certain to happen: either it’s in roaring flood, and quite unfishable, or else—and this is the more common—it has dwindled away all to nothing, and you might as well begin and throw a fly over a pavement in Piccadilly. Very well; what you want is to turn the mountain-lochs into reservoirs; you bank up the surplus water in the hills; and then, in times of drought, when the river has got low, and would be otherwise unfishable, you send up the keepers to the sluices, turn on a supply, and freshen the pools, so that the fish wake up, and wonder what’s going to happen. That is one thing. Then there’s another. You know that even when the water is in capital order, you may go down day by day, and find it impossible to get a single cast because of the blazing sunlight. That is a terrible misfortune; for you are all the time aware, as you sit on the bank, and hopelessly watch for clouds, that the fine weather is drying up the hills, and that very soon the stream will have dwindled away again. Very well; what you want for that is en enormous awning, that can be moved from pool to pool, and high enough not to interfere with the casting. By that means, you see, you could transfer any portion of a Highland stream into the land where it is always afternoon; and the fish, thinking the cool of the evening had already come, would begin to disport themselves and play with the pretty little coloured things that the current brought down. Look at the saving of time! Generally, in the middle of the day, there is a horrible long interval when nothing will move in a river. Whether it is the heat, or the sunlight, or the general drowsiness of nature, there’s hardly ever anything stirring between twelve o’clock and four; and you lie on the bank, and consume a frightful amount of tobacco; and you may even fall asleep, if you have been doing a good deal of night-work in London. But if you have this great canvas screen, that can be stretched from the trees on one side to the poles on the other—very gradually and slowly, like the coming over of the evening—then the little fishes will begin to say to themselves, ’Here, boys, it’s time to go out and have some fun,’ and you can have fine sport, in spite of all the sunlight that ever blazed. However, I’m afraid you’d want the revenue of some half-a-dozen dukes before you could secure the ideal salmon-river." "They’re doing so many things with electricity now: couldn’t you bring that in?" said Käthchen. "Couldn’t you have an electric shock running out from the butt of the rod the moment the salmon touched the fly?" But this was sheer frivolity. Frank Meredyth suddenly turned to young Ross and said— "Oh, you can tell me, Mr. Ross—is the Garra a difficult river to fish?"