Chambers's Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Art, Fifth Series, No. 28, Vol. I, July 12, 1884

No. 28.—Vol. I.
Price 1½ d.
SATURDAY, JULY 12, 1884.
About eight o’clock of a June morning the train draws up at a small station within a short run south of the Scottish metropolis. It is not a typical June morning. There has been a fortnight’s drought, followed by two days of rain—the latter rejoicing the heart of the agriculturist and the angler; but yesternight the rain ceased, and its place has been taken by a gray mist, or haar , which the east wind is bringing up from the German Ocean. No angler loves mist. Is it not set down in the angler’s book of common-law precedents, that in the case of Man versus Trout, this obscure element is to be construed in favour of the defender? The station at which we alight is situated in an upland valley, shut in on the north and west by the mounded Pentlands; but this morning their outline shows only like a denser and darker bank of clouds in a gray waste of cloudland. Down into the valley also, thin streaks of mist are creeping dismally and slow, groping their way forward with long dripping fingers, like a belated band of midnight ghosts which the morning light has struck with sudden blindness. To the south-west, the Peeblesshire hills are less obscured, but there is floating over them the dull glaze, the leaden hue, which makes my companion sadly prognosticate thunder—and thunder to the angler’s sport is as fatal as mist.
It is indeed very far from being a typical June morning. The earth is gray, and the sky is gray; and the trees and hedgerows that flank the fields and overshadow the cottages and the little inn, are not musical with the song of any bird. There is even in the air a touch of the east wind, that fiend of the North Sea who comes to us annually with the crocus and the primrose, and spends at least three months of his baneful existence in tying innumerable knots upon human nerves. His sublime excellency the Sun is doubtless up, as his custom is, long ere now, but this morning he wilfully persists in keeping his chamber. All this is marked in the time we take to alight at the railway station, give up our tickets, and, shouldering basket and rod, set out towards our destination for the day, which lies over this long ridge to the right.