by trout. So we drove home, when all the great
tableland was touched with yellow light from a rift in the west, and all
the broken hills looked blue against the silvery grey. God bless them!
for man cannot spoil them, nor any revolution shape them other than they
are. We see them as the folk from Flodden saw them, as Leyden knew them,
as they looked to William of Deloraine, as they showed in the eyes of Wat
of Harden and of Jamie Telfer of the Fair Dodhead. They have always
girdled a land of warriors and of people fond of song, from the oldest
ballad-maker to that Scotch Probationer who wrote,

Lay me here, where I may see
Teviot round his meadows flowing,
And about and over me
Winds and clouds for ever going.

It was dark before we splashed through the ford of Borthwick Water, and
dined, and wrote to Mr. Anderson of Princes Street, Edinburgh, for a
supply of Bloody Doctors. But we never had a chance to try them. I have
since fished Clearburn from a boat, but it was not a day of rising fish,
and no big ones came to the landing-net. There are plenty in the loch,
but you need not make the weary journey; they are not for you nor me.

THE LADY OR THE SALMON?

The circumstances which attended and caused the death of the Hon.
Houghton Grannom have not long been known to me, and it is only now that,
by the decease of his father, Lord Whitchurch, and the extinction of his
noble family, I am permitted to divulge the facts. That the true tale of
my unhappy friend will touch different chords in different breasts, I am
well aware. The sportsman, I think, will hesitate to approve him; the
fair, I hope, will absolve. Who are we, to scrutinise human motives, and
to award our blame to actions which, perhaps, might have been our own,
had opportunity beset and temptation beguiled us? There is a certain
point at which the keenest sense of honour, the most chivalrous affection
and devotion, cannot bear the strain, but break like a salmon line under
a masterful stress. That my friend succumbed, I admit; that he was his
own judge, the severest, and passed and executed sentence on himself, I
have now to show.

I shall never forget the shock with which I read in the "Scotsman," under
"Angling," the following paragraph:

"Tweed.--Strange Death of an Angler.--An unfortunate event has cast a
gloom over fishers in this district. As Mr. K---, the keeper on the B---
water, was busy angling yesterday, his atte