Of all poachers of salmon, perhaps that one with whom one is least out of sympathy was the man--is he now extinct, one wonders?--who, fishing with trout-rod and fly, and bearing on his back the most modest of trout creels, instantly, when he came to a likely cast for a fish, was wont to change his trout fly for a salmon one. If he hooked a salmon and a watcher appeared on the scene, invariably the fish "broke" him. If no watcher put in an appearance, generally the angler found that he had sudden and pressing business at home, and that fish left the riverside snugly smuggled inside the lining of a coat, or in a great circular pocket made for the purpose. It was such an one that, nigh on a hundred years ago, Mr. Scrope caught red-handed one day on his rented salmon water near Melrose. The man was a guileless creature from Selkirk, too innocent, it appeared, to be able to account for the salmon flies in the inside of his dilapidated hat, or for the 10 lb. salmon reposing in his pocket. "Dodd! I jalouse it's mebbes luppen in whan I was wadin' the watter," he said with artless smile. "They're gey queer beasts, fish." Still to this day there may perhaps be found instances where they have "luppen in" to a too capacious pocket; for the nature of the salmon has not changed, and they are still "gey queer," and are found occasionally in "gey queer" places. There was, one remembers, not so long ago, a certain boy from Eton, or from some other of the great public schools, who, with a sister, wandered one lowering autumn evening by the brown waters of a Border stream. And how it happened there is none to say, save those who dimly saw it, but there came a vision of a water-bailiff, scant of breath, pounding heavily across the fields, whilst a maiden, fleet of foot, sped away through the gloom, sore handicapped by the antics of a half-dead and wholly slippery fish that nothing would induce to stay inside her jacket. And whether she won free, I know not. But it is said there was salmon steak for breakfast next morning in that maiden's home. Surely the devil played but an amateur part when he essayed to break down the stern virtue of St. Anthony with temptations no stronger than those over which the good Saint so easily triumphed. Had he clapped the holy man down by the banks of a Border stream when fish were running in the autumn, there might have been another tale to tell--that is, if a close season had existed in mediæval times. I trow we should have seen St. Anthony nipping hot-foot over the hill, with the bosom of his monk's gown protruding in a way at which no honest water-bailiff could possibly have winked. Things as strange have happened in our own day; but maybe they were due to that drop of reiver blood which courses more or less swiftly through the veins of most Border folk, and which, now that there are no cattle to "lift" from the English side, impels them for want of better to lift from the water a salmon whenever opportunity may offer.