“Od bless you, sir, I can do naething wi’ that goad; but if ye’ll gang wi’ me a wee piece up the Todburn-Hope, or up to the Rowntree-Linn, I’ll let ye see gumping to perfection.”
On being assured that it was not above half a mile to either of the places, the laird accompanied Barnaby without hesitation, to witness this pastoral way of fishing. By the way their converse became very interesting to both parties, but we cannot interrupt the description of such a favourite rural sport just now. Let it suffice that their discourse was all concerning a fair unfortunate, of whom the reader has heard a good deal already, and of whom he shall hear more in due time.
They crossed over a sloping ground, at the bottom of a green steep hill, and soon came into the Todburn-Hope. It was a narrow level valley between two high hills, and terminated in the haunted linn, above the sheep-house formerly mentioned. Down this narrow vale the Tod Burn ran with a thousand beautiful serpentine windings, and at every one of these turns there were one or two clear deep pools, overhung by little green banks. Into the first of these pools Barnaby got with his staff, plunging and poaching to make all the fish take into close cover; then he threw off his ragged coat, tucked up the sleeves of his shirt to the shoulders, tying them together behind, and into the pool he got again, knees and elbows, putting his arms in below the green banks, into the closest and most secret recesses of the trouts. There was no eluding him; he threw them out one after another, sometimes hitting the astonished laird on the face, or any other part of the body without ceremony, for his head being down sometimes close with the water, and sometimes below it, he did not see where he flung them. The trouts being a little startled at this momentary change from one element to another, jumped about on the grass, and cast so many acute somersets, that the laird had greater difficulty in getting hold of them the second time to put them into his basket, than Barnaby had at first; and when the latter had changed the scene of plunder to a new pool, Lindsey was commonly to be seen beside the old one, moving slowly about on his hands and knees. “I think ye’re pinched to catch them on the dry grund, sir,” said Barnaby to him.
“No, no,” returned he, with the utmost simplicity; “but I was looking lest some of them had made their way among the long grass and eluded me; and besides they are so very active and slippery that I seldom can keep the hold of them that I get.”
As they were going from one of these little pools to another, he said to our shepherd, “So this is what you call gumping?”
“Yes, sir, this is gumping, or guddling, ony o’ them ye like to ca’t.”
“I do not think this is altogether a fair way of fishing.”
“Now, I think it is muckle fairer than the tither way, sir. Your way is founded on the lowest artifice and deceit, but I come as an avowed enemy, and let them escape me if they can. I come into a family as a brave mountain robber or free-booter; but you come as a deceitful friend, promising to treat the family with all good things, that you may poison them every one unawares. A mountaineer’s sports are never founded on cunning; it’s a’ sheer and main force wi’ us.”
Lindsey confessed that the shepherd’s arguments had some foundation in nature and truth, but that they savoured of a period exempt from civilization and the fine arts. “At all events,” said he, “it is certainly the most downright way of fishing that I ever beheld.” In short, it was not long till the laird was to be seen wading in the pools, and gumping as busily as the other; and, finally, he was sometimes so intent on his prey, that the water was running over his back, so that when he raised himself up it poured in torrents from his fine Holland shirt and stained cambrick ruffles. “Ye hae settled the pletts o’ your sark,” said Barnaby. Never did the family of Earlhall behold such a basket of trouts; and never had its proprietor such a day’s sport at the fishing, as he had at the gumping or guddling the trouts among the links of the Todburn-Hope.