Sleeps beneath Kinrara's willow.
But after this salaam of courtesy the river roars and bickers down the long stretch of shaggy glen which intervenes between the upper and lower Rocks of Craigellachie, whence the Clan Grant, whose habitation is this ruggedly beautiful strath, takes its slogan of "Stand fast, Craigellachie," till it finally sends its headlong torrent shooting miles out through the salt water of the Moray Firth. In its course of over a hundred miles its fierce current has seldom tarried; yet now and again it spreads panting into a long smooth stretch of still water when wearied momentarily with buffeting the boulders in its broken and contorted bed; or when a great rock, jutting out into its course, causes a deep black sullen pool whose sluggish eddy is crested with masses of yellow foam. Merely as a wayfaring pedestrian I have followed Spey from its source to its mouth; but my intimacy with it in the character of a fisherman extends over the five-and-twenty miles of its lower course, from the confluence of the pellucid Avon at Ballindalloch to the bridge of Fochabers, the native village of the Captain Wilson who died so gallantly in the recent fighting in Matabeleland. My first Spey trout I took out of water at the foot of the cherry orchard below the sweet-lying cottage of Delfur. My first grilse I hooked and played with trout tackle in "Dalmunach" on the Laggan water, a pool that is the rival of "Dellagyl" and the "Holly Bush" for the proud title of the best pool of lower Spey. My first salmon I brought to the gaff with a beating heart in that fine swift stretch of water known as "The Dip," which connects the pools of the "Heathery Isle" and the "Red Craig," and which is now leased by that good fisherman, Mr. Justice North. I think the Dundurcas water then belonged to the late Mr. Little Gilmour, the well-known welter-weight who went so well to hounds season after season from Melton Mowbray, and who was as keen in the water on Spey as he was over the Leicestershire pastures. A servant of Mr. Little Gilmour was drowned in the "Two Stones" pool, the next below the "Holly Bush;" and the next pool below the "Two Stones" is called the "Beaufort" to this day—named after the present Duke, who took many a big fish out of it in the days when he used to come to Speyside with his friend Mr. Little Gilmour.
In those long gone-by days brave old Lord Saltoun, the hero of Hougomont, resided during the fishing season in the mansion-house of Auchinroath, on the high ground at the mouth of the Glen of Rothes. One morning, some five-and-forty years ago, my father drove to breakfast with the old lord and took me with him. Not caring to send the horse to the stable, he left me outside in the dogcart when he entered the house. As I waited rather sulkily—for I was mightily hungry—there came out on to the doorstep a very queer-looking old person, short of figure, round as a ball, his head sunk between very high and rounded shoulders, and with short stumpy legs. He was curiously attired in a whole-coloured suit of gray; a droll-shaped jacket the great collar of which reached far up the back of his head, surmounted a pair of voluminous breeches which suddenly tightened at the knee. I imagined him to be the butler in morning dishabille; and when he accosted me good-naturedly, asking to whom the dogcart and myself belonged, I answered him somewhat shortly and then ingenuously suggested that he would be doing me a kindly act if he would go and fetch me out a hunk of bread and meat, for I was enduring tortures of hunger.
Then he swore, and that with vigour and fluency, that it was a shame that I should have been left outside; called a groom and bade me alight and come indoors with him. I demurred—I had got the paternal injunction to remain with the horse and cart. "I am master here!" exclaimed the old person impetuously; and with further strong language he expressed his intention of rating my father soundly for not having brought me inside along with himself. Then a question occurred to me, and I ventured to ask, "Are you Lord Saltoun?" "Of course I am," replied the old gentleman; "who the devil else should I be?" Well, I did not like to avow what I felt, but in truth I was hugely disappointed in him; for I had just been reading Siborne's Waterloo, and to think that this dumpy old fellow in the duffle jacket that came up over his ears was the valiant hero who had held Hougomont through cannon fire and musketry fire and hand-to-hand bayonet fighting on the day of Waterloo while the post he was defending was ablaze, and who had actually killed Frenchmen with his own good sword, was a severe disenchantment. When I had breakfasted he asked leave of my father to let me go with him to the waterside, promising to send me home safely later in the day. When he was in Spey up to the armpits—for the "Holly Bush" takes deep wading from the Dundurcas side—the old lord looked even droller than he had done on the Auchinroath doorstep, and I could not reconcile him in the least to my Hougomont ideal. He was delighted when I opened on him with that topic, and he told me with great spirit of the vehemence with which his brother-officer Colonel Macdonnell, and his men forced the French soldiers out of the Hougomont courtyard, and how big Sergeant Graham closed the door against them by main force of muscular strength. Before he had been in the water twenty minutes the old lord was in a fish; his gillie, old Dallas, who could throw a fine line in spite of the whisky, gaffed it scientifically, and I was sent home rejoicing with a 15 lb. salmon for my mother and a half-sovereign for myself wherewith to buy a trouting rod and reel. Lord Saltoun was the first lord I ever met, and I have never known one since whom I have liked half so well.
Spey is a river which insists on being distinctive. She mistrusts the stranger. He may be a good man on Tweed or Tay, but until he has been formally introduced to Spey and been admitted to her acquaintance, she is chary in according him her favours. She is no flighty coquette, nor is she a prude; but she has her demure reserves, and he who would stand well with her must ever treat her with consideration and respect. She is not as those facile demi-mondaine streams, such as the Helmsdale or the Conon, which let themselves be entreated successfully by the chance comer on the first jaunty appeal. You must learn the ways of Spey before you can prevail with her, and her ways are not the ways of other rivers. It was in vain that the veteran chief of southern fishermen, the late Francis Francis, threw his line over Spey in the veni, vidi, vici manner of one who had made Usk and Wye his potsherd, and who over the Hampshire Avon had cast his shoe. Russel, the famous editor of the Scotsman, the Delane of the north country, who, pen in hand, could make a Lord Advocate squirm, and before whose gibe provosts and bailies trembled, who had drawn out leviathan with a hook from Tweed, and before whom the big fish of Forth could not stand—even he, brilliant fisherman as he was, could "come nae speed ava" on Spey, as the old Arndilly water-gillie quaintly worded it.
Yet Russel of the Scotsman was perhaps the most whole-souled salmon fisher of his own or any other period. His piscatorial aspirations extended beyond the grave. Who that heard it can ever forget the peroration, slightly profane perhaps, but entirely enthusiastic, of his speech on salmon fishing at a Tweedside dinner? "When I die," he exclaimed in a fine rapture, "should I go to heaven, I will fish in the water of life with a fly dressed with a feather from the wing of an angel; should I be unfortunately consigned to another destination, I shall nevertheless hope to angle in Styx with the worm that never dieth." To his editorial successor Spey was a trifle more gracious than she had been to Russel; but she did not wholly open her heart to this neophyte of her stream, serving him up in the pool of Dellagyl with the ugliest, blackest, gauntest old cock-salmon of her depths, owning a snout like the prow of an ancient galley.
Spey exacts from those who would fish her waters with success a peculiar and distinctive method of throwing their line, which is known as the "Spey cast." In vain has Major Treherne illustrated the successive phases of the "Spey cast" in the fishing volume of the admirable Badminton series. It cannot be learned by diagrams; no man, indeed, can become a proficient in it who has not grown up from childhood in the practice of it. Yet its use is absolutely indispensable to the salmon angler on the Spey. Rocks, trees, high banks, and other impediments forbid resort to the overhead cast. The essence and value of the Spey cast lies in this—that his line must never go behind the caster; well done, the cast is like the dart from a howitzer's mouth of a safety rocket to which a line is attached. To watch it performed, strongly yet easily, by a skilled hand is a liberal education in the art of casting; the swiftness, sureness, low trajectory, and lightness of the fall of the line, shot out by a dexterous swish of the lifting and propelling power of the strong yet supple rod, illustrate a phase at once beautiful and practical of the poetry of motion. Among the native salmon fishermen of Speyside, quorum ego parva pars fui, there are two distinct manners which may be severally distinguished as the easy style and the masterful style. The disciples of the easy style throw a fairly long line, but their aim is not to cover a maximum distance. What they pride themselves on is precise, dexterous, and, above all, light and smooth casting. No fierce switchings of the rod reveal their approach before they are in sight; like the clergyman of Pollok's Course of Time they love to draw rather than to drive. Of the masterful style the most brilliant exponent is a short man, but he is the deepest wader in Spey. I believe his waders fasten, not round his waist, but round his neck. I have seen him in a pool, far beyond his depth, but "treading water" while simultaneously wielding a rod about four times the length of himself, and sending his line whizzing an extraordinary distance. The resolution of his attack seems actually to hypnotise salmon into taking his fly; and, once hooked, however hard they may fight for life, they are doomed fish.
Ah me! These be gaudy, flaunting, flashy days! Our sober Spey, in the matter of salmon fly-hooks, is gradually yielding to the garish influence of the times. Spey salmon now begin to allow themselves to be captured by such indecorous and revolutionary fly-hooks as the "Canary" and the "Silver Doctor." Jaunty men in loud suits of dittoes have come into the north country, and display fly-books that vie in the variegated brilliancy of their contents with a Dutch tulip bed. We staunch adherents to the traditional Spey blacks and browns, we who have bred Spey cocks for the sake of their feathers, and have sworn through good report and through evil report by the pig's down or Berlin wool for body, the Spey cock for hackle, and the mallard drake for wings, have jeered at the kaleidoscopic fantasticality of the leaves of their fly-books turned over by adventurers from the south country and Ireland; and have sneered at the notion that a self-respecting Spey salmon would so far demoralise himself as to be allured by a miniature presentation of Liberty's shop-window. But the salmon has not regarded the matter from our conservative point of view; and now we, too, ruefully resort to the "canary" as a dropper when conditions of atmosphere and water seem to favour that gaudy implement. And it must be owned that even before the "twopence-coloured" gentry came among us from distant parts, we, the natives, had been side-tracking from the exclusive use of the old-fashioned sombre flies into the occasional use of gayer yet still modest "fancies." Of specific Spey hooks in favour at the present time the following is, perhaps, a fairly correct and comprehensive list: purple king, green king, black king, silver heron, gold heron, black dog, silver riach, gold riach, black heron, silver green, gold green, Lady Caroline, carron, black fancy, silver spale, gold spale, culdrain, dallas, silver thumbie, Sebastopol, Lady Florence March, gold purpie, and gled (deadly in "snawbree"). The Spey cock—a cross between the Hamburg cock and the old Scottish mottled hen—was fifty years ago bred all along Speyside expressly for its feathers, used in dressing salmon flies; but the breed is all but extinct now, or rather, perhaps, has been crossed and re-crossed out of recognition. It is said, however, to be still maintained in the parish of Advie, and when the late Mr. Bass had the Tulchan shootings and fishings his head keeper used to breed and sell Spey cocks.
Probably the most extensive collection of salmon fly-hooks ever made was that which belonged to the late Mr. Henry Grant of Elchies, a property on which is some of the best water in all the run of Spey. His father was a distinguished Indian civil servant and of later fame as an astronomer; and his elder brother, Mr. Grant of Carron, was one of the best fishermen that ever played a big fish in the pool of Dellagyl. Henry Grant himself had been a keen fisherman in his youth, and when, after a chequered and roving life in South Africa and elsewhere, he came into the estate, he set himself to build up a representative collection of salmon flies for all waters and all seasons. His father had brought home a large and curious assortment of feathers from the Himalayas; Mr. Grant sent far and wide for further supplies of suitable and distinctive material, and then he devoted himself to the task of dressing hundred after hundred of fly-hooks of every known pattern and of every size, from the great three-inch hook for heavy spring water to the dainty little "finnock" hook scarcely larger than a trout fly. A suitable receptacle was constructed for this collection from the timber of the "Auld Gean Tree of Elchies"—the largest of its kind in all Scotland—whose trunk had a diameter of nearly four feet and whose branches had a spread of over twenty yards. The "Auld Gean Tree" fell into its dotage and was cut down to the strains of a "lament," with which the wail and skirl of the bagpipes drowned the noise of the woodmen's axes. Out of the wood of the "Auld Gean Tree" a local artificer constructed a handsome cabinet with many drawers, in which were stored the Elchies collection of fly-hooks classified carefully according to their sizes and kinds. The cabinet stood—and, I suppose, still stands—in the Elchies billiard-room; but I fear the collection is sadly diminished, for Henry Grant was the freest-handed of men and towards the end of his life anybody who chose was welcome to help himself from the contents of the drawers. Yet no doubt some relics of this fine collection must still remain; and I hope for his own sake that Mr. Justice A.L. Smith the present tenant of Elchies, is free of poor Henry's cabinet.
It is a popular delusion that Speyside men are immortal; this is true only of distillers. But it is a fact that their longevity is phenomenal. If Dr. Ogle had to make up the population returns of Strath Spey he could not fail to be profoundly astonished by the comparative blankness of the mortality columns. Frederick the Great, when his fellows were rather hanging back in the crisis of a battle, stung them with the biting taunt, "Do you wish to live for ever?" If his descendant of the present day were to address the same question to the seniors of Speyside, they would probably reply, "Your Majesty, we ken that we canna live for ever; but, faith, we mak' a gey guid attempt!" A respected relative of mine died a few years ago at the age of eighty-five. Had he been a Southron, he would have been said to have died full of years; but of my relative the local paper remarked in a touching obituary notice that he "was cut off prematurely in the midst of his mature prime." When I was young, Speyside men mostly shuffled off this mortal coil by being upset from their gigs when driving home recklessly from market with "the maut abune the meal;" but the railways have done away in great measure with this cause of death. Nowadays the centenarians for the most part fall ultimate victims to paralysis. In the south it is understood, I believe, that the third shock is fatal; but a Speyside man will resist half a dozen shocks before he succumbs, and has been known to walk to the kirk after having endured even a greater number of attacks.