I have not come across any trout fishing scores that will beat this record of seven days fishing.
Fortune had again favoured me, excepting one day, when it was a blazing sun; they were all good fishing weather.
When August came, to my own gun my bag of grouse was five hundred and a half brace.
Of all sport I know nothing so deeply exciting as the steady head and tail rise of a heavy salmon, say a 20lb. fish, and the firm tug that you feel as he goes down.
Remember what Major Treherne says, "Don't strike, that tug has fastened the hook if it is to fasten;" but there is nothing so quietly satisfying as the feel on your hip of a heavy pannier of brown trout.
About the salmon you do as your gillie tells you, plant your foot on that rock, or on that sod, and cast there, and the fish comes (when he does come), as the fly swings round two yards below, or rather comes when he does come, the coming being a long way the exception; but the basket of brown trout has been your own doing—you have cast your little flies yard by yard where your own experience tells you the brown trout will come, and the gay little chap does come.
It is all your own act and deed: the gillie has had no hand in it, except bewailing the loss of time after those messing trout, when elsewhere there might be "just a chance" of the salmon that don't come.
I take it that it is every bit as sportsmanslike in its way to kill the little brown snipe, or the little brown trout, as to stalk the monarch of the glen, or rise the monarch of the stream. As regards the snipe, he is good to eat, and the monarch of the glen certainly not. I suppose for punishment of my sins, I once had to live for a week on the latter.
In passing, I may remark as to size of Scotch trout taken with the fly.
In my twenty-six years experience of Scotch fly fishing I have been accessory to the taking of only four fish exceeding 2lb. each in weight.