raws me always to the loch when I have the luck to
be within twenty miles of it. There are trout in Clearburn! The Border
angler knows that the trout in his native waters is nearly as extinct as
the dodo. Many causes have combined to extirpate the shy and spirited
fish. First, there are too many anglers:

Twixt Holy Lee and Clovenfords,
A tentier bit ye canna hae,

sang that good old angler, now with God, Mr. Thomas Tod Stoddart. But
between Holy Lee and Clovenfords you may see half a dozen rods on every
pool and stream. There goes that leviathan, the angler from London, who
has been beguiled hither by the artless "Guide" of Mr. Watson Lyall.
There fishes the farmer's lad, and the schoolmaster, and the wandering
weaver out of work or disinclined to work. In his rags, with his thin
face and red "goatee" beard, with his hazel wand and his home-made reel,
there is withal something kindly about this poor fellow, this true
sportsman. He loves better to hear the lark sing than the mouse cheep;
he wanders from depopulated stream to depopulated burn, and all is fish
that comes to his fly. Fingerlings he keeps, and does not return to the
water "as pitying their youth." Let us not grudge him his sport as long
as he fishes fair, and he is always good company. But he, with all the
other countless fishermen, make fish so rare and so wary that, except
after a flood in Meggat or the Douglas burn, trout are scarce to be taken
by ordinary skill. As for

Thae reiving cheils
Frae Galashiels,

who use nets, and salmon roe, and poisons, and dynamite, they are
miscreants indeed; they spoil the sport, not of the rich, but of their
own class, and of every man who would be quiet, and go angling in the
sacred streams of Christopher North and the Shepherd. The mills, with
their dyes and dirt, are also responsible for the dearth of trout.

Untainted yet thy stream, fair Teviot, runs,

Leyden sang; but now the stream is very much tainted indeed below Hawick,
like Tweed in too many places. Thus, for a dozen reasons, trout are nigh
as rare as red deer. Clearburn alone remains full of unsophisticated
fishes, and I have the less hesitation in revealing this, because I do
not expect the wanderer who may read this page to be at all more
successful than myself. No doubt they are sometimes to be had, by the
basketful, but not often, nor by him who thinks twice before risking his
life by smothering in a peaty bottom.