"Good Mary Riddle-good be wi' you;"-away she trips-and we feel the pathos of these two lines of Wordsworth,

"E'er she had wept, e'er she had mourned, A young and happy child."

There we have him-at the Tail-Fly. My eye! but he's a bouncer. Why, he springs like a whitling. Hooked by the dorsal fin. Then 'tis a ten minutes' job-and where shall we land him-for the bank is lined with trees -celebrated by the name of "The Grenadiers,”—and he knows better than to stem the current? Shall we in? A fifteen feet rod is nothing to our right arm (biceps fourteen inches), and under our left orter the crutch. The landing-net won't be much the worse for a rub on the gravel. So here't goes. Pretty chill

for there is yet in the river some "sna'-broo." Na! na! You think of stealing a march on us by a doubledo you? But Christopher's wide awake-and has wound up a dozen yards in a jiffey, so he has you hard in hand-and if you do not "tak tent" of what you're about, he will run you right ashore, high and dry, on the silver sand, where you will wallop about till you seem basted for the frying-pan. Avast! or you will upset us by running between our legs-fair play's a jewel. Off at a right angle like a shot. What! You have made up your mind to dash in among the intertwistment of those muddy old roots? But you should have tried that earlier in your career; for there -there, my darling-we give you the butt till your hog-back is seen above

the water, and you look like a hulk that has dropt anchor. Why don't you keep moving? Aye-we thought 'twou'd be so- -floundering down the stream you go, like a child drowning -and you must know now that your days are numbered. Poor fellow he has lost heart, and we almost pity him-we have about as much pity for him as would "fill a wren's eye"- -so this way again, if you please-aye, that's the wayswimming against the stream's not so difficult as you thought-near the edge in smooth water-come away, my jewel-the transparent fluid's not much more than your own depth now-why, wriggling so, you seem more like a serpent than a troutbut now you have lain down to take a nap-and we shall lift you up so gently in our landing-net, which in another capacity has settled the hash of many a larger lubber, that you will slip away through your slumbers into the unsubstantial flowing of the piscatory paradise provided for all fishes that have led a tolerably honest life in the troubled waters of this sublunary world.

You seldom kill such a trout as that in the Tweed with the fly. The truth is, he had no intention of taking it. But 'tis perilous at times rashly to rub shoulders with a professor. The minnow is your bait for monsters. But we are not a great master of minnow-and we abhor worm. There is cruelty in worm, and also in minnow-and we are not cruel. As for this two-pounder, (he is not nearly three,) what has he suffered? A struggle-" a sleep-and a forgetting"-to end-but of that he could

have no prefigured idea-in a fry. We have endured more anguish mental and bodily-in one minutethan all he ever did during his whole life-the last quarter of an hour included; and we have our doubts whether even then his state was not that of enviable enjoyment. It was at least far from being one of ennui; all his energies were called into active play; the alternations of fear and hope, in all cases where, as in this, hope is the prevailing passion, yield more pleasure than pain; and many millions of men, struggling against the stream as desperately as he did, and yielding to it more reluctantly, whether with happier or as disastrous issue, would laugh in your face were you to call them miserable, and set you down in their turmoil for a prodigious ninny.

Out of this long pool we have many a day creeled two dozenand there would seem to be a law prohibiting any trout from gaining a settlement in the parish under ten inches. There are no paupers-except, indeed, upon the principle that all paupers are well fed-but we believe few of the population are out of employment. Here is an Alderman. And here the Dean of Guild. By and by we shall have basketed the whole Corporation. Yet you cannot call them fat. Red about the gills they are; but that in a fish is a proof of temperance-that they drink nothing but water. Small heads round shoulders thick waists-tapering tails-so elegant that, but for brown back and yellow belly, you might think them small salmon.

"A brace of trouts!" You might as well speak of a brace of herrings. Yet there are noble trout in your English rivers. We do not mean in the North of England-for that, to all intents and purposes, is Scotland -but all over England. But in stillwater preserves, what with gross feeding, and what with gross indolence, they lose all vigour, and make about as much play as logs of wood of the same dimensions. We remember once borrowing a pin and a bit of pack-thread from an old woman who was sweeping the gravel walks in the beautiful grounds of Hagley; and having stolen a worm, we pitched it on the crooked brass

before the nose of a fine-looking fellow, who was slowly sailing about near the edge of a sort of shallow artificial lakelet. He took it as kindly as Don Key would have taken a mouthful of calipash; and began to shift his quarters towards some weeds, which we presume were meant for an island. With the feeblest inclination of our wrist possible, we deflected him from his first intention; but found it no easy matter either to persuade or convince him that he was pin'd; and when he did begin to suspect that something was amiss with his mouth, even then he waddled away more like a broken-winged duck than a trout in the "policy" of a British nobleman. In the Tweed-even when low-he would have been beaten to mummy against the stones in five minutesbut only think of him in a-spate! Yet his colour was pretty good-nor were his proportions to be sneezed at; he was manifestly of a good strain of spawn-but that lazy life had melted the very soul within him, and he was as tedious as a toad. The pack-thread could hardly have spun a cock-chafer; and yet it brought him to shore without stretching; there he lay, gasping in his fatness, half a brace; and looking at him, not without pity, we thought, not without contempt, of the Cockneys.

But of your true London anglers, we have always held and said that they are at the top of the tree. They have trained themselves up to the utmost fineness and delicacy of execution, and in shyest water, where no brother of the angle in all Scotland could move a fin, they will kill fish. Their tackle, of course, is of the most exquisite and scientific kind -their entire set-out at the river's edge perfect. We should not presume to throw a fly with the least celebrated proficient of the Walton Club. That we have been elected an Honorary Member of that Society, true it is that we are most proud; but ashamed are we to think, that, from an inevitable confusion and misunderstanding at the time we received the Secretary's letter, communicating to us the pleasant intelligence, it remains, as too many others do from the most respected quarters, without acknowledgment; and per

round about London, and elsewhere in the South, such a person is useful to the uninitiated; but what should we think of the wight who employed worthy Watty Ritchie of Peebles, for example, to shew him where the fish usually lie in the Tweed? Nay, to shew him the very fish themselves, as plain as if they were on a plate or in a pan. Pools there are of peculiar opulence, but the population is pretty equally distributed here; and any man with half an eye in his head can see for himself which are the most promising, and in what particular part the fish are likely to lie. As for seeing the animals themselves, if there be a "blue breeze," you might with magnifiers "pore on the brook that bubbles by," from "morn till dewy eve," without seeing any thing more animated than stones and gravel. As for the fish seeing you, there is no sense to be sure in stamping along the banks within an inch of the brink; but at a moderate distance, and in a right position with respect to the sun, there is no risk of your being seen; nor, were you seen, would a Tweed trout care a pin about you, unless you had a very uncommon appearance indeed, and were something truly terrific.

of mutual espionage, which ought not to be tolerated in a free country. How any fish, liable at all times of the day, in any thing like fine weather, to such unprovoked persecution, can get fat, surpasses our comprehension, and would seem to argue much obtuseness of feeling; but we find that his perceptive, emotive, and locomotive powers, are all of the highest order; and that his perspicacity in seeing danger, and his alacrity in escaping it, are such as, on the principles of the inductive philosophy, could only have been acquired by a perpetual course of such active exercise as must, in the ordinary course of nature, have kept him in a state of lankness, equal to that of Pharaoh's lean kine, or Mr Elwes's greyhounds.

"If," says our excellent Bungler,' "during your walks by the river-side, you have remarked any good fish, it is fair to presume that other persons have marked them also; suppose the case of two wellknown fish, one of them (which I will call A), lying above a certain bridge, the other (which I will call B) lying below the bridge; suppose farther, that you have just caught B, and that some curious and cunning friend should say to you, in a careless way,' Where did you take that fine fish?' A finished fisherman would advise you to tell your enquiring friend that you had taken your fish just above the bridge, describing, as the scene of action, the spot which, in truth, you knew to be still occupied by the other fish A. Your friend would then fish no more for A, supposing that to be the fish which you have caught; and whilst he innocently resumes his operations below the bridge, where he falsely imagines B still to be, A is left quietly for you, if you can catch him."

Here the whole meanness, wretchedness, misery, wickedness, vice, guilt, and sin of the system are brought out in one maxim. Hiring a spy to shew you a fish at his dinner, that you may steal upon him in shadow and murder him at his maggot, by luring him to prey on poisoned food, is conduct that admits only of this extenuation, that the fish is himself such a suspicious and dangerous character, that ten to one he con

From another maxim, it would appear that the fish in some rivers about London lead a life of perpetual unhappiness and anxiety. "Do not imagine that because a fish does not instantly dart off on first seeing you, he is the less aware of your presence; he almost always on such occasions ceases to feed, and pays you the compliment of devoting his whole attention to you, whilst he is preparing for a start whenever the apprehended danger becomes sufficiently imminent." This lively maxim gives us melancholy insight into most English angling. We see clear, still water, and at the bottom a trout. He is "alone in his glory," and the glutton is at dinner-on what-it is not said; but probably on slugs. All the while he is nuzzling in the mud, his mind is abstracted by being, in self-defence, under the necessity of keeping an eye on the "gentleman in black;" and both parties-he who is always over head and ears in water, and he who is but occasionally so-are attempting to take every advantage of each other, by means of a system

and d to one by

trives not merely to elude your piscicidal arts, but to outwit you at your own game, by homicidally causing you by a false step to get yourself drowned in the river;-but to murder one out of two wellknown fish (videlicet B, him who used to lie below the bridge) and then, that nobody but yourself shall murder the remaining half-brace of the two well-known fish (videlicet A, him who is still lying above the bridge), to play to your friend the part, not only of a finished fisherman, but of a finished liar-exhibits -we must say—to our uncorrupted mind, such a picture of complicated villany, that we do not hesitate for a moment indignantly to declare, that the fiend in human shape, who could not only perpetrate such enormities, but instigate and instruct the angling youth of England to imitate, and perhaps surpass them (nothat is impossible in nature), deserves -if not no longer to be permitted to exist on the surface of our globecertainly to be cut off, by ban of excommunication, from Fire and

Water.

Yet is the ineffable enormity of the sin sunk in the inconceivable silliness of the system. Two wellknown fish! One above and the other below the bridge, and all the angling vicinage occupied during a whole season in attempting to entrap the two first capital letters of the alphabet, A and B!

But what comes here? We call that poaching, cross-fishing with the double rod. Our good friend the "Bungler," in maxim xviii, says the learned are much divided in opinion as to the propriety of "whipping with two flies." Now, here come a couple of unconscionable Edinburgh cockneys whipping with forty. Human nature cannot stand that-incipient convulsions are in our midriff. The conceited coofs had heard of the double rod from Maule or Goldie, or some other top-sawyers, and they too must try it! From opposite stances they regard each other with mutual and equal anxiety, as to the movements and measures most likely to be next carried into immediate effect by the perplexed brethren of the braes. The imitative being a strong instinctive principle in human nature, (also in more mere ani

mals than is generally thought-for there are others almost as much so as the monkey and the penguin,) do take notice-we beseech us-how, the moment one begins to attempt to wind up, the other is working at his reel too, like a Jew at a barrel-organ. No line could stand that, were the machinery brought into actual play; but great impediments have been encountered-nor does it seem probable-judging from the posture of affairs-that for some time they will be overcome by the gentlemen of the opposition. They are shouting across one of the widest pools keen complaints of some fishing-tacklemonger in London-for our choicest Edinburgh cockneys get every thing "from town." "Of course," they have been diddled; and the machi nery is at a stand-still. Perhaps 'tis better so, than that both lines should have been broken on the wheel. Meanwhile all the forty flies are flying in the air-and even at this distance, we see they are a strange set. Not a few are larger than hummingbirds-many are manifestly sea-troutflies, gay but not gaudy-and (oh! grant gracious heaven that we do not split!) what possible contrivances can those others be that are dangling among the insects? Artificial minnows! by Daedalus!

That is merciful. But those-yes, they are- those are real worms, and very large worms too-so much so, that we thought they were eels. Cross-fishing with the double-rod by a couple of Edinburgh Cockneys, evidently belonging to no particular profession-the line laden with salmon flies, artificial minnows, and natural worms! We experience considerable curiosity to observe the effect of a sudden descent of all that furniture into the liquid element. There! now we call that making a splash. Fish are easily alarmed; but they soon recover from an ordinary fright, and do not remain all day beneath a bank, because they had the misfor tune of catching a gruesome glimpse of your countenance pretty early in the morning. Out of sight out of mind-you seldom for more than a few minutes disturb their tranquillity by merely looking at them; but the effect of a splash of this sort is more lasting; for on venturing from their various places of retreat to in