village is a small tarn, very picturesquely situated among low hills,
and provided with the very tiniest feeder and outflow. There is a sluice
at the outflow, and, for some reason, the farmer used to let most of the
water out, in the summer of every year. In winter the tarn is used by
the curling club. It is not deep, has rather a marshy bottom, and many
ducks, snipe, and wild-fowl generally dwell among the reeds and marish
plants of its sides. Nobody ever dreamed of fishing here, but one day a
rustic, "glowering" idly over the wall of the adjacent road, saw fish
rising. He mentioned his discovery to an angler, who is said to have
caught some large trout, but tradition varies about everything, except
that the fish are very "dour." One evening in August, a warm, still
evening, I happened to visit the tarn. As soon as the sun fell below the
hills, it was literally alive with large trout rising. As far as one
could estimate from the brief view of heads and shoulders, they were
sometimes two or three pounds in weight. I got my rod, of course, as did
a rural friend. Mine was a small cane rod, his a salmon-rod. I fished
with one Test-fly; he with three large loch-flies. The fish were rising
actually at our feet, but they seemed to move about very much, never, or
seldom, rising twice exactly at the same place. The hypothesis was
started that there were but few of them, and that they ran round and
round, like a stage army, to give an appearance of multitude. But this
appears improbable. What is certain was our utter inability ever to get
a rise from the provoking creatures. The dry fly is difficult to use on
a loch, as there is no stream to move it, and however gently you draw it
it makes a "wake"--a trail behind it. Wet or dry, or "twixt wet and
dry," like the convivial person in the song, we could none of us raise
them. I did catch a small but beautifully proportioned and pink-fleshed
trout with the alder, but everything else, silver sedge and all,
everything from midge to May-fly, in the late twilight, was offered to
them in vain. In windy or cloudy weather it was just as useless; indeed,
I never saw them rise, except in a warm summer stillness, at and after
sunset. Probably they would have taken a small red worm, pitched into
the ripple of a rise; but we did not try that. After a few evenings,
they seemed to give up rising altogether. I don't feel certain that they
had not been netted: yet no trout seeme