s frequently succeed in
clearing the wave, but generally pitch nose foremost into the water
where it begins to rise, and are hurled back head over tail in impotent
confusion. Some of the heavier fish, too, after their jump may be seen
to come down with portentous skelp on top of the retaining wall of the
salmon-run in mid-stream, thence--apparently with "wind bagged"--to be
ignominiously hurried back into the deep pool from which they have but
the moment before hurled themselves. The general effect of the spectacle
is as if one watched an endless kind of finny Grand National
Steeplechase; one grows dizzy with the constant rise and fall of
innumerable fish over the big jump, and it is almost a relief to turn
and watch the bailiffs with their landing-nets lift from the shallow,
rushing water at the cauld-side fish after fish, which they carry up and
carefully put in the smooth water at top of the cauld. How many hundreds
of salmon one may thus see in the course of a couple of hours, on a day
when the river is in spate too heavy for the fish to succeed in
ascending the cauld, it is impossible to estimate.

Big fish do not seem to have been so common in olden days as they are
now. Mr. Scrope mentions that in all his twenty years' experience he
never caught one above 30 lbs. weight, and very few above 20 lbs. Fish
of that size are common now almost as sparrows in a London street, more
especially in the lower stretches of Tweed. Thirty pounds hardly excites
remark, and salmon up to 40 lbs. or over are caught with fly nearly
every autumn. Much larger fish, too, have been taken of recent years;
one of 57 lbs. was landed in 1873, one of 57-1/2 lbs. in 1886, and
various fish of over 50 lbs. weight at later dates, whilst in December
1907 a dead fish of 60 lbs. was found in Mertoun Water.

Then there was that giant fish lost near Dryburgh by Colonel Haig of
Bemersyde, "perhaps the greatest salmon ever hooked in Tweed," as Sir
Herbert Maxwell remarks in his _Story of the Tweed_. Lost fish are
proverbially the largest fish, but in this instance it was not the
fisher who boasted of the weight. Late one evening, fishing in the Haly
Weil, the Colonel got fast in something heavy which, resistless as fate,
bored steadily down the river a full half mile to the Tod Holes in
Dryburgh Water. Here, heavy and sullen, and never showing himself, he
ploughed slowly about, and Colonel Haig, already overdue at home, became
impatient, believing that