ngler, too, is
as fortunate as the lover of the picturesque. The trout that have hidden
themselves all summer, or at best have cautiously nibbled at the worm-
bait, now rise freely to the fly. Wherever a yellow leaf drops from
birch tree or elm the great trout are splashing, and they are too eager
to distinguish very subtly between flies of nature's making and flies of
fur and feather. It is a time when every one who can manage it should be
by the water-side, and should take with him, if possible, the posthumous
work of Sir Thomas Dick Lauder on the "Rivers of Scotland."

This book, as the author of "Rab and his Friends" tells us in the
preface, is a re-publication of articles written in 1848, on the death-
bed of the author, a man of many accomplishments and of a most lovable
nature. He would lie and dictate or write in pencil these happy and
wistful memories of days passed by the banks of Tweed and Tyne. He did
not care to speak of the northern waters: of Tay, which the Roman
invaders compared to Tiber; of Laxford, the river of salmon; or of the
"thundering Spey." Nor has he anything to say of the west, and of
Galloway, the country out of which young Lochinvar came, with its soft
and broken hills, like the lower spurs of the Pyrenees, and its streams,
now rushing down defiles of rock, now stealing with slow foot through the
plains. He confines himself to the limits of the Scottish Arcadia; to
the hills near Edinburgh, where Ramsay's Gentle Shepherd loved and sang
in a rather affected way; and to the main stream and the tributaries of
the Tweed. He tells, with a humour like that of Charles Lamb in his
account of his youthful search for the mysterious fountain-head of the
New River, how he sought among the Pentland Hills for the source of the
brook that flowed past his own garden. The wandering stream led him
through many a scene renowned in Border history, up to the heights whence
Marmion surveyed the Scottish forces encamped on Borough Moor before the
fatal day of Flodden. These scenes are described with spirit and loving
interest; but it is by Tweedside that the tourist will find his most
pleasant guide in Lauder's book. Just as Cicero said of Athens, that in
every stone you tread on a history, so on Tweedside by every nook and
valley you find the place of a ballad, a story, or a legend. From
Tweed's source, near the grave of the Wizard Merlin, down to Berwick and
the sea, the Border "keeps" and towers are