Many otherwise well-principled persons believe that little more is required in angling than the exercise of patience.  Place a merely patient man, acquainted only with pedestrian movements, upon a strong-headed horse determined to win, and give him the start at a steeple-chase, with Lord Waterford not far behind, and it will be seen before he has crossed much country, where patience is always as useful as it is praiseworthy.  Place the same patient man, if he happens to have been picked up alive, and eventually recovers, in the midst of a roaring rock-bound river, and suppose him (a thing we confess, in his case, not quite conceivable) to have hooked a twenty-pound salmon at the tail of the stream, just where it subsides into some vast, almost fathomless, and far-extended pool, and that the said salmon, being rather of a restless disposition, and moreover somewhat disquieted by feeling an unaccustomed barb in his cheek or tongue, takes his 300 yards down the deep water at a single run, and then goes helter-skelter over a cataract, which had occupied him most of the preceding Sunday to ascend, after many a sinewy but unsuccessful spring!  Will patience avail a man any thing in such a predicament, when he ought rather to run like an Arab, or dive like a dolphin, “splash, splash, towards the sea,” notwithstanding the chance of his breaking his neck among the rocks, or being drowned while trying to round a crag which he cannot clamber over?  Let us hear Mr Scrope’s account of his third cast, one fine morning, when he came to Kingswell Lees.

“Now every one knows that Kingswell Lees, in fishermen’s phrase, fishes off land; so there I stood on terra dura, amongst the rocks that dip down to the water’s edge.  Having executed one or two throws, there comes me a voracious fish, and makes a startling dash at ’Meg with the muckle mouth.’[10] Sharply did I strike the caitiff; whereat he rolled round disdainful, making a whirl in the water of prodigious circumference; it was not exactly Charybdis, or the Maelstrom, but rather more like the wave occasioned by the sudden turning of a man-of-war’s boat.  Being hooked, and having by this time set his nose peremptorily down the stream, he flashed and whizzed away like a rocket.  My situation partook of the nature of a surprise.  Being on a rocky shore, and having had a bad start, I lost ground at first considerably; but the reel sang out joyously, and yielded a liberal length of line, that saved me from the disgrace of being broke.  I got on the best pace I was able, and was on good ground just as my line was nearly all run out.  As the powerful animal darted through Meg’s Hole, I was just able to step back and wind up a few yards of line; but he still went at a killing pace, and when he came near to Melrose bridge, he evinced a distressing preference for passing through the further arch, in which case my line would have been cut by the pier.  My heart sunk with apprehension, for he was near