an endless kind of finny Grand National Steeplechase; one grows dizzy with the constant rise and fall of innumerable fish over the big jump, and it is almost a relief to turn and watch the bailiffs with their landing-nets lift from the shallow, rushing water at the cauld-side fish after fish, which they carry up and carefully put in the smooth water at top of the cauld.  How many hundreds of salmon one may thus see in the course of a couple of hours, on a day when the river is in spate too heavy for the fish to succeed in ascending the cauld, it is impossible to estimate.

Big fish do not seem to have been so common in olden days as they are now.  Mr. Scrope mentions that in all his twenty years’ experience he never caught one above 30 lbs. weight, and very few above 20 lbs.  Fish of that size are common now almost as sparrows in a London street, more especially in the lower stretches of Tweed.  Thirty pounds hardly excites remark, and salmon up to 40 lbs. or over are caught with fly nearly every autumn.  Much larger fish, too, have been taken of recent years; one of 57 lbs. was landed in 1873, one of 57-1/2 lbs. in 1886, and various fish of over 50 lbs. weight at later dates, whilst in December 1907 a dead fish of 60 lbs. was found in Mertoun Water.

Then there was that giant fish lost near Dryburgh by Colonel Haig of Bemersyde, “perhaps the greatest salmon ever hooked in Tweed,” as Sir Herbert Maxwell remarks in his Story of the Tweed.  Lost fish are proverbially the largest fish, but in this instance it was not the fisher who boasted of the weight.  Late one evening, fishing in the Haly Weil, the Colonel got fast in something heavy which, resistless as fate, bored steadily down the river a full half mile to the Tod Holes in Dryburgh Water.  Here, heavy and sullen, and never showing himself, he ploughed slowly about, and Colonel Haig, already overdue at home, became impatient, believing that he must have foul-hooked a moderate-sized fish.  Darkness was fast coming on, and at last the Colonel told his attendant to wade in and try to net the fish.

“He’s that muckle I cannot get him in, sir,” cried the lad after a time.

But the Colonel could not wait.

“Nonsense,” he said.  “Get his head in.  I can’t stop here all night.”

Then came the not uncommon result of trying to net a big fish in an uncertain light; the rim of the net fouled the gut cast, and away went the fish.  It would spoil the story not to tell the rest of it in Sir Herbert Maxwell’s own words.

“The Colonel did not realise the magnitude of his disaster until two or three weeks later, when he happened to be waiting for a train at St. Boswells Station.  The porter came to him and said: 

“‘Hae ye ony mind, Colonel, o’ yon big fush ye slippit in the Tod Holes yon nicht?’

“‘Oh, I mind him well,’ replied the Colonel; ’a good lump of a fish he was, I believe, but I never saw him rightly.’