There is another loch on an extremely remote hillside, eight miles from the smallest town, in a pastoral country.  There are trout enough in the loch, and of excellent size and flavour, but you scarcely ever get them.  They rise freely, but they always rise short.  It is, I think, the most provoking loch I ever fished.  You raise them; they come up freely, showing broad sides of a ruddy gold, like the handsomest Test trout, but they almost invariably miss the hook.  You do not land one out of twenty.  The reason is, apparently, that people from the nearest town use the otter in the summer evenings, when these trout rise best.  In a Sutherland loch, Mr. Edward Moss tells us (in “A Season in Sutherland"), that he once found an elegant otter, a well-made engine of some unscrupulous tourist, lying in the bottom of the water on a sunny day.  At Loch Skene, on the top of a hill, twenty miles from any town, otters are occasionally found by the keeper or the shepherds, concealed near the shore.  The practice of ottering can give little pleasure to any but a depraved mind, and nothing educates trout so rapidly into “rising short”; why they are not to be had when they are rising most vehemently, “to themselves,” is another mystery.  A few rises are encouraging, but when the water is all splashing with rises, as a rule the angler is only tantalised.  A windy day, a day with a large ripple, but without white waves breaking, is, as a rule, best for a loch.  In some lochs the sea-trout prefer such a hurricane that a boat can hardly be kept on the water.  I have known a strong north wind in autumn put down the sea-trout, whereas the salmon rose, with unusual eagerness, just in the shallows where the waves broke in foam on the shore.  The best day I ever had with sea-trout was muggy and grey, and the fish were most eager when the water was still, except for a tremendously heavy shower of rain, “a singing shower,” as George Chapman has it.  On that day two rods caught thirty-nine sea-trout, weighing forty pounds.  But it is difficult to say beforehand what day will do well, except that sunshine is bad, a north wind worse, and no wind at all usually means an empty basket.  Even to this rule there are exceptions, and one of these is in the case of a tarn which I shall call, pleonastically, Little Loch Beg.

This is not the real name of the loch—­quite enough people know its real name already.  Nor does it seem necessary to mention the district where the loch lies hidden; suffice it to say that a land of more streams and scarcer trout you will hardly find.  We had tried all the rivers and burns to no purpose, and the lochs are capricious and overfished.  One loch we had not tried, Loch Beg.  You walk, or drive, a few miles from any village, then you climb a few hundred yards of hill, and from the ridge you see, on one hand a great amphitheatre of green and purple mountain-sides, in the west; on the east, within a hundred yards under a slope, is Loch Beg.