LONDON
KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH & CO., 1 PATERNOSTER SQUARE
1889
These articles are reprinted, by the permission of the Editor, fromthe Daily News. They were selected and arranged by Mr.Pett Ridge, who, with the Publishers, will perhaps kindly take a sharein the responsibility of republishing them. p. 1
September is the season of the second and lovelier youth of the river-sceneryof Scotland. Spring comes but slowly up that way; it is June beforethe woods have quite clothed themselves. In April the angler orthe sketcher is chilled by the east wind, whirling showers of hail,and even when the riverbanks are sweet with primroses, the bluff topsof the border hills are often bleak with late snow. This stateof things is less unpropitious to angling than might be expected.A hardy race of trout will sometimes rise freely to the artificial flywhen the natural fly is destroyed, and the angler is almost blindedwith dusty snowflakes. All through midsummer the Scotch riverslose their chief p. 2attractions.The bracken has not yet changed its green for the fairy gold, the hueof its decay; the woods wear a uniform and sombre green; the watersare low and shrunken, and angling is almost impossible. But withSeptember the pleasant season returns for people who love “tobe quiet, and go a-fishing,” or a-sketching. The hills puton a wonderful harmony of colours, the woods rival the October splendoursof English forests. The bends of the Tweed below Melrose and roundMertoun—a scene that, as Scott says, the river seems loth to leave—maychallenge comparison with anything the Thames can show at Nuneham orCliefden. The angler, too, is as fortunate as the lover of thepicturesque. The trout that have hidden themselves all summer,or at best have cautiously nibbled at the worm-bait, now rise freelyto the fly. Wherever a yellow leaf drops from birch tree or elmthe great trout are splashing, and they are too eager to distinguishvery subtly between flies of nature’s making and flies of furand feather. It is a time when every one who can manage it shouldbe by the water-side, and should take with him, if possible, the posthumousp. 3work of Sir Thomas DickLauder on the “Rivers of Scotland.”
This book, as the author of “Rab and his Friends” tellsus in the preface, is a re-publication of articles written in 1848,on the death-bed of the author, a man of many accomplishments and ofa most lovable nature. He would lie and dictate or write in pencilthese happy and wistful memories of days passed by the banks of Tweedand Tyne. He did not care to speak of the northern waters: ofTay, which the Roman invaders compared to Tiber; of Laxford, the riverof salmon; or of the “thundering Spey.” Nor has heanything to say of the west, and of Galloway, the country out of whichyoung Lochinvar came, with its soft and broken hills, like the lowerspurs of the Pyrenees, and its streams, now rushing down defiles ofrock, now stealing with slow foot through the plains. He confineshimself to the limits of the Scottish Arcadia; to the hills near Edinburgh,where Ramsay’s Gentle Shepherd loved and sang in a rather affectedway; and to the main stream and the tributaries of the Tweed.He tells, with a humour like that of Charles Lamb in his account ofhis youthful p. 4search forthe mysterious fountain-head of the New River, how he sought among thePentland Hills for the source of the brook that flowed past his owngarden. The wandering stream led him through many a scene renownedin Border history, up to the heights whence