By watching the loch when it is frozen, a man might come to learn something of the springs; but, even so, it is hard to keep clear of them in summer.  Now the wind almost always blows from the west, dead against the little piece of gravelly shore at the eastern side, so that casting against it is hard work and unprofitable.  On this day, by a rare chance, the wind blew from the east, though the sky at first was a brilliant blue, and the sun hot and fierce.  I walked round to the east side, waded in, and caught two or three small fellows.  It was slow work, when suddenly there began the greatest rise of trout I ever saw in my life.  From the edge of the loch as far as one could clearly see across it there was that endless plashing murmur, of all sounds in this world the sweetest to the ear.  Within the view of the eye, on each cast, there were a dozen trout rising all about, never leaping, but seriously and solemnly feeding.  Now is my chance at last, I fancied; but it was not so—­far from it.  I might throw over the very noses of the beasts, but they seldom even glanced at the (artificial) fly.  I tried them with Greenwell’s Glory, with a March brown, with “the woodcock wing and hare-lug,” but it was almost to no purpose.  If one did raise a fish, he meant not business—­all but “a casual brute,” which broke the already weakened part of a small “glued-up” cane rod.  I had to twist a piece of paper round the broken end, wet it, and push it into the joint, where it hung on somehow, but was not pleasant to cast with.  From twelve to half-past one the gorging went merrily forward, and I saw what the fish were rising at.  The whole surface of the loch, at least on the east side, was absolutely peppered with large, hideous insects.  They had big grey-white wings, bodies black as night, and brilliant crimson legs, or feelers, or whatever naturalists call them.  The trout seemed as if they could not have too much of these abominable wretches, and the flies were blown across the loch, not singly, but in populous groups.  I had never seen anything like them in any hook-book, nor could I deceive the trout by the primitive dodge of tying a red thread round the shank of a dark fly.  So I waded out, and fell to munching a frugal sandwich and watching Nature, not without a cigarette.

Now Nature is all very well.  I have nothing to say against her of a Sunday, or when trout are not rising.  But she was no comfort to me now.  Smiling she gazed on my discomfiture.  The lovely lines of the hills, curving about the loch, and with their deepest dip just opposite where I sat, were all of a golden autumn brown, except in the violet distance.  The grass of Parnassus grew thick and white around me, with its moonlight tint of green in the veins.  On a hillside by a brook the countryfolk were winning their hay, and their voices reached me softly from far off.  On the loch the marsh-fowl flashed and dipped, the wild ducks played and dived and rose; first circling high and higher, then, marshalled