he lived in days when water-bailiffs were neither so numerous, nor so strict in the execution of their duties, as they now are, for nothing could cure him of the habit, when he saw a fish struggling up a shallow stream, of dashing in, seizing that salmon in his teeth, and laying it at the feet of his embarrassed master, who, far from being connected with the poaching fraternity, was, indeed, a magistrate, to whom the gift of a salmon in such circumstances brought only confusion.

After all, is there not generally a something lovable in the man who poaches purely for sport’s sake?  Who can fail to mourn the end of poor, harmless, gallant, drucken Jocky B——­, who gave his life for his love of what he conceived to be sport?  “Here’s daith or glory for Jocky,” he cried, when the watchers surrounded him, leaving but the one possibility of escape.  And in that swollen, wintry torrent into which he plunged, the Bailiff Death laid hands on Jocky.  Perhaps even now in the shades below, his “ghost may land the ghosts of fish”; mayhap, with a cleek such as that to which his cold fingers yet stiffly clung when they found him in the deep pool, he may still, now and again, be permitted with joyous heart to lift from the waters that ripple through Hades spectral fish of fabulous dimensions.

Salmon do not now appear to be so numerous in Tweed as apparently they were eighty or a hundred years ago; it is said that in 1824, when the nets had been off the lower reaches of the river for the Sunday, sometimes as many as five hundred salmon and grilse would be taken at Kelso of a Monday morning by the net and coble.  It is a prodigious haul of fish.  One’s mouth, too, waters as one reads of the numbers that were in those days taken in most stretches of the river by rod and line—­though probably a goodly number of them were kelts.

Yet, even now, if in the month of November, when waters are red and swollen, one stands by Selkirk cauld, the fish may be seen in numbers almost incredible.  By scores at a time you may see them, great and small, hurl themselves into the air over the great wave which boils at the cauld-foot.  And the bigger fish, landing—­if one may use the term—­far beyond the first upheaval of the wave, will rush stoutly up the swirling, foaming rapid, perhaps half-way to the smooth water above the cauld, ere they are swept back, still valiantly struggling, into the seething pool below.  The smaller fish less frequently succeed in clearing the wave, but generally pitch nose foremost into the water where it begins to rise, and are hurled back head over tail in impotent confusion.  Some of the heavier fish, too, after their jump may be seen to come down with portentous skelp on top of the retaining wall of the salmon-run in mid-stream, thence—­apparently with “wind bagged”—­to be ignominiously hurried back into the deep pool from which they have but the moment before hurled themselves.  The general effect of the spectacle is as if one watched