Upon the second occasion the take was much larger, thirty-eight salmon of a smaller size being the reward of their iniquity, weighing in the aggregate four hundred and forty pounds, and producing in cash £8 sterling, divided among eleven people. These stolen fish pass through numerous hands. A person comes at a given time and takes away the spoil; all that the actual poacher obtains as his share is a few pence per pound weight. They are bought from the thieves by middlemen, who again dispose of them to certain salesmen—each party, of course, obtaining a profit. In former times, as at present, there were more ways of killing a salmon than by angling for it. Parties used to be made up for the purpose of “burning the water,” a practice which prevailed largely on the Tweed, and which afforded good rough sport. The burning took place a little after sunset, when an old boat was commissioned for the purpose, and flaming torches of pinewood were lighted to lure the fish to their destruction. The leister, a sharp iron fork, was used on these occasions with deadly power; rude mirth and song were usually the order of the night; and the practice being illegal was not without a spice of danger, or at least a chance of a ducking. Burning the water, it must, however, be confessed, was more a picturesque way of poaching than a means of adding legitimately to the produce of the fisheries as a branch of commerce. It would have been well for the salmon-fisheries had the arts of poaching never extended beyond the rude practice here alluded to; but now poaching, as I have endeavoured to show, has become a business, and countless thousands of the fish are swept off the breeding-beds and sold to dealers. There is on most rivers an organised system of taking and disposing of the fish; France, till very lately, affording the chief outlet for this kind of food—an outlet, however, which a recent Act of Parliament has done much to close up. Legislation on the salmon question has of late been greatly extended, some powerful Acts of Parliament having been passed for the better regulation of the various British salmon-fisheries.[7]