But my first trout!--killed--fairly landed out of the water--dancing about in all its speckled beauty on the green bank: this was indeed an event--this was an achievement of no ordinary interest. Fishing! to thee I owe more of exquisite enjoyment than to any other amusement whatever. I am a mountain child--born, and nursed, and trotted about from my cradle on the winding banks of a bonny burn, through whose waters there looked up eyes, and there waved fins and tails. I have taken, again and again, in after life, the wings of the morning, and have made my dwelling with the stunted thorn, the corbie nest, the croaking raven, the willie-wagtail, and the plover, and the snipe, and the lapwing. I have seen mist--glorious mist!--in all its fantastic shapes, and openings and closings, from the dense crawling blanket of wet to the bright, sun-penetrated, rent, and dispersing tatterment of haze. I have studied all manner of cloud, from the swollen, puffed up, and rolling castellation, to the smooth, level, and widespread overshadowing. The breezes have been my companions all along. I could scan their merits and demerits with a fisher's eye, from the rough and sudden puff, urging the pool into ridges of ripple, to the steady, soft, and balmy breath that merely brought the surface into a slight commotion. Burns, too, I have studied, and streams, and gullets, and weils, and clay-brows, and bumbling pools. I have fished in the Caple with Willie Herdman. (See Blackwood, volume sixth.) I have fished in the Turrit with Stoddart. (See his admirable book on Angling.) But the true happiness of a fisher is solitude. Oh, for a fine morning in April, fresh, breezy, and dark!--a mountain glen, through which the Dar or the Brawn threads its mazy descent; the bottom clear, and purified by a recent flood; the waters not yet completely subsided--something betwixt clear and muddy--a light blue, and a still lighter brown.
Not a shepherd, nor a sheep, nor a living creature within sight--nothing but the sound of the passing stream, and the plash of the hooked and landing trout. A whole immensity of unexhausted stream unfurled before me; the day yet in its nonage; my pockets stuffed with stomach store; my mind at ease; my tongue ever and anon repeating, audibly--"Now for it, this will do, there he has it, this way, sir, this way; nay, no tricks upon travellers--out, out you _must_ come--so, so, my pretty fellow, take it gently, take it gently!" But I am forgetting my first trout in the thousand and tens of thousands which have succeeded it. I had a knife--I know not how I got it; perhaps I bought it at a Thornhill fair, with a sixpence which the guidman of Auchincairn gave me as my fairing, or perhaps--but no matter; as Wordsworth would say, "I had a knife!" and this knife was my humble servant in all manner of duties; it was, in fact, my slave; it would cut bourtree, and fashion scout guns; it would make saugh whistles; it would fashion bows and arrows; it would pare cheese, and open hazel nuts; it was more generally useful than Hudibras' sword--and I felt its value. In fact, what was I without my knife? A soldier without his gun, a fiddler without his fiddle, a tailor without his shears. And yet this very knife, dear and useful as it was to me, I parted with--I gave it away, I fairly bartered it for a bait-hook with a horse-hair line attached to it. But then I had seen, and seen it for the first time, a trout caught with this very hook and line. Having a hook and line, I cut myself, from an adjoining wood, a rowan-tree fishing-rod, which might serve a double purpose, protecting me from the witches, and aiding me in catching trout. Away I went, "owre muirs and mosses mony o'," to the glorious Caple, of which I had heard much. I baited my hook with some difficulty; for worms, whatever boys may be, are not fond of _the sport_. I stood alongside of the deep black pool. I saw the deception alight in the water, and heard the plump; it sank, and sank, by a certain law, which philosophers have named gravitation; it became first pale-white, then yellow, then almost red, as it sank away into the dark profundity of mossy water. It lay still and motionless for a few instants. At last it moved; ye powers! it cuts the water like an edged instrument--it pulls--pulls strongly. The top of the rod touches the surface of the pool--something must be done--I am all trepidation. But, by mere strength of pulling and of tackle, a large yellow-wamed, black-backed fellow lies panting on the sand bank at the foot of the pool.