at the outflow, and, for some reason, the farmer used to let most of the water out, in the summer of every year.  In winter the tarn is used by the curling club.  It is not deep, has rather a marshy bottom, and many ducks, snipe, and wild-fowl generally dwell among the reeds and marish plants of its sides.  Nobody ever dreamed of fishing here, but one day a rustic, “glowering” idly over the wall of the adjacent road, saw fish rising.  He mentioned his discovery to an angler, who is said to have caught some large trout, but tradition varies about everything, except that the fish are very “dour.”  One evening in August, a warm, still evening, I happened to visit the tarn.  As soon as the sun fell below the hills, it was literally alive with large trout rising.  As far as one could estimate from the brief view of heads and shoulders, they were sometimes two or three pounds in weight.  I got my rod, of course, as did a rural friend.  Mine was a small cane rod, his a salmon-rod.  I fished with one Test-fly; he with three large loch-flies.  The fish were rising actually at our feet, but they seemed to move about very much, never, or seldom, rising twice exactly at the same place.  The hypothesis was started that there were but few of them, and that they ran round and round, like a stage army, to give an appearance of multitude.  But this appears improbable.  What is certain was our utter inability ever to get a rise from the provoking creatures.  The dry fly is difficult to use on a loch, as there is no stream to move it, and however gently you draw it it makes a “wake”—­a trail behind it.  Wet or dry, or “twixt wet and dry,” like the convivial person in the song, we could none of us raise them.  I did catch a small but beautifully proportioned and pink-fleshed trout with the alder, but everything else, silver sedge and all, everything from midge to May-fly, in the late twilight, was offered to them in vain.  In windy or cloudy weather it was just as useless; indeed, I never saw them rise, except in a warm summer stillness, at and after sunset.  Probably they would have taken a small red worm, pitched into the ripple of a rise; but we did not try that.  After a few evenings, they seemed to give up rising altogether.  I don’t feel certain that they had not been netted:  yet no trout seemed to be on sale in the village.  Their presence in the water may perhaps be accounted for thus:  they may have come into the loch from the river, by way of the tiny feeder; but the river-trout are both scarce and small.  A new farmer had given up letting the water off, and probably there must have been very rich feeding, water-shrimps or snails, which might partly account for the refusal to rise at the artificial fly.  Or they may have been ottered by the villagers, though that would rather have made them rise short than not rise at all.