reason the Tweed is more difficult to fish with the dry fly than—­the Test, for example.  The water is swifter and very dark, it drowns the fly soon, and on the surface the fly is less easily distinguished than at Whitchurch, in the pellucid streams.  The Leader a tributary, may be fished with dry fly; on the Tweed one can hardly manage it.  There is a plan by which rising trout may be taken—­namely, by baiting with a small red worm and casting as in fly-fishing.  But that is so hard on the worm!  Probably he who can catch trout with fly on the Tweed between Melrose and Holy Lee can catch them anywhere.  On a good day in April great baskets are still made in preserved parts of the Tweed, but, if they are made in open water, it must be, I fancy, with worm, or with the “screw,” the lava of the May-fly.  The screw is a hideous and venomous-looking animal, which is fixed on a particular kind of tackle, and cast up stream with a short line.  The heaviest trout are fond of it, but it can only be used at a season when either school or Oxford keeps one far from what old Franck, Walton’s contemporary, a Cromwellian trooper, calls “the glittering and resolute streams of Tweed.”

Difficult as it is, that river is so beautiful and alluring that it scarcely needs the attractions of sport.  The step banks, beautifully wooded, and in spring one mass of primroses, are crowned here and there with ruined Border towers—­like Elibank, the houses of Muckle Mou’ed Meg; or with fair baronial houses like Fernilea.  Meg made a bad exchange when she left Elibank with the salmon pool at its foot for bleak Harden, frowning over the narrow “den” where Harden kept the plundered cattle.  There is no fishing in the tiny Harden burn, that joins the brawling Borthwick Water.

The burns of the Lowlands are now almost barren of trout.  The spawning fish, flabby and useless, are killed in winter.  All through the rest of the year, in the remotest places, tourists are hard at them with worm.  In a small burn a skilled wormer may almost depopulate the pools, and, on the Border, all is fish that comes to the hook; men keep the very fingerlings, on the pretext that they are “so sweet” in the frying-pan.  The crowd of anglers in glens which seem not easily accessible is provoking enough.  Into the Meggat, a stream which feeds St. Mary’s Loch, there flows the Glengaber, or Glencaber burn:  the burn of the pine-tree stump.  The water runs in deep pools and streams over a blue slatey rock, which contains gold under the sand, in the worn holes and crevices.  My friend, Mr. McAllister, the schoolmaster at St. Mary’s, tells me that one day, when fish were not rising, he scooped out the gravel of one of these holes with his knife, and found a tiny nugget, after which the gold-hunting fever came on him for a while.  But little is got nowadays, though in some earlier period the burn has been diverted from its bed, and the people used solemnly to wash the sand, as in California