Above the foaming tide, I ween, Scarce half the charger's neck was seen; For he was barded from counter to tail, And the rider was armed complete in mail; Never heavier man and horse Stemm'd a midnight torrent's force. "The warriors very plume, I say, Was daggled by the dashing spray; Yet, through good heart, and Our Ladye's grace, At length he gained the landing place." Above the point where William rode the water, the scenery is quiet and pastoral; about Ashkirk and Synton we are in the {176}lands of lairds whose genealogies are recounted in the rhymes of old Satchells, who "can write nane But just the letters of his name." Further up, Ale rests in the dull deep loch of Alemuir, which looks as if it held more pike than trout. And so we follow her into the hills and the water-shed that, on one side, contributes feeders to the Ettrick. It is a lofty land of pasture and broken hills, whence you see the airy peaks of Skelfhill, Penchrise, the Dumon, and the ranges of "mountains" as Scott calls the hills through which the Border Waters run, Yarrow, Ettrick, Borthwick Water and Ale Water. A "water" is larger than a "burn," but attains not to the name of a river. Rule, the next tributary as we ascend Teviot, is but a "Water," a pretty trout stream it would be if it had fair play. The question of fishing in this country is knotted. Almost all the trout streams were open to everybody, in my boyhood, when I could fish all day in Tweed or Ale, and never see a rod but my own. The few anglers were sportsmen. "Duffer" as I was, I remember a long summer day on Tweed at Yair, when, having come too late for the ten o'clock "rise" of trout, I had an almost empty creel. Just before sunset I foregathered with old Adam Linton, his large creel three-quarters full of beauties. "What did you get them with?" I asked. At the moment he was using the tiniest midges, and the finest tackle. "Oh, wi' ae thing and another, according to the time o' day," he answered. I daresay he used the clear water worm, fished up stream; deadly sin m Hampshire, but not in the Forest. Since these days the world has gone wild on angling, the waters are crowded like the Regent's canal with rods. Now I am all for letting every man have his cast; but the only present hope for the survival of trout is in the associations of anglers who do their best to put down netting and dynamiting. A close time when trout are out of season, we owe to Sir Herbert Maxwell, opposed as he was by the Radical Member for the Border Burghs. I {177}am not sure that there is a rule against slaying trout under, shall we say, seven inches? However it may be, I had my chance and wasted it; being a duffer. Trout may become extinct like the Dodo; it makes no odds to me.