This fine old sportsman--though he must have been sixty at the time--walked twenty miles after a day’s sport so as to let Joe have the only spare seat on a buggy that he might catch the night express to town for work on the morrow. I can see the tall handsome old man now on the moorside, gaily waving adieu to Joe with a champagne bottle which he had seized from the picnic basket to cheer him on the road. Joe had many days with him on the Tweed; one of them, following such a big spate that an old countryman wading in front of them was never seen more after they had warned him against imprudently breasting the swirl of the water where the river made an abrupt bend ahead. The gloom of this incident was partly mitigated by their being told that the man was a drunkard whose fate had often been so prophesied to him; but they fished no more in a spate on the Tweed. Fun was oftener their portion. I fancy it was to Fearon that Joe made the _bon-mot_ current in the Garrick Club, where he represented himself as lunching with Noah on the Ark. “You must have good spate fishing here, Mr. Noah,” he reports himself as saying while they sat smoking on the balcony overlooking the Flood. “It _would_ be good,” replied the host, “but unluckily, you see, I have only two worms.” He writes himself of his fishing on Loch Awe; and later, on Loch Etive, as the guest of our charming friend Alec Stevenson, whose cheery voice would ask of his keeper after breakfast: “Is it fishin’ or shutin’ the day, Duncan?” But there is no mention of a happy six weeks in Sutherlandshire where we were chiefly fed by the guests “killing” of the daily trout, proudly displayed at even upon a large tray in the hall. I think it was here that Joe had trudged for three hours up a mountain with his fly-rod set up, to find--when he reached the tarn at the top--that his top joint had fallen off on the road; as he was alone only the midges heard his remarks, for he had not even his fourteen-year old son with him--the happy companion of his later angling days. It was into just such a tarn, that that boy fell off the boat one day, when landing a trout, and was advised by his father to run about in the natural state on the moor while his clothes dried on a sun-baked rock. A lovely place is Inchnadamph on blue Loch Assynt; the great mountain that guards the valley towards Lochinver can be golden in the long, northern twilight, when the water that has been as a sapphire before the sunset, becomes purple in the gloaming; but oh! the midges! Useless to tie our heads in bags and grease our faces: they penetrated everywhere and “bit like dogs.” They _almost_ deterred Joe from his evening hour on the water because of the landing afterwards, when the pony would not stand for him to step into the cart.