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“Dodd! I jalouse it’s mebbes luppen in whan I was wadin’ the watter,” he said with artless smile. “They’re gey queer beasts, fish.”

Still to this day there may perhaps be found instances where they have “luppen in” to a too capacious pocket; for the nature of the salmon has not changed, and they are still “gey queer,” and are found occasionally in “gey queer” places. There was, one remembers, not so long ago, a certain boy from Eton, or from some other of the great public schools, who, with a sister, wandered one lowering autumn evening by the brown waters of a Border stream. And how it happened there is none to say, save those who dimly saw it, but there came a vision of a water-bailiff, scant of breath, pounding heavily across the fields, whilst a maiden, fleet of foot, sped away through the gloom, sore handicapped by the antics of a half-dead and wholly slippery fish that nothing would induce to stay inside her jacket. And whether she won free, I know not. But it is said there was salmon steak for breakfast next morning in that maiden’s home.

Surely the devil played but an amateur part when he essayed to break down the stern virtue of St. Anthony with temptations no stronger than those over which the good Saint so easily triumphed. Had he clapped the holy man down by the banks of a Border stream when fish were running in the autumn, there might have been another tale to tell–that is, if a close season had existed in mediaeval times. I trow we should have seen St. Anthony nipping hot-foot over the hill, with the bosom of his monk’s gown protruding in a way at which no honest water-bailiff could possibly have winked. Things as strange have happened in our own day; but maybe they were due to that drop of reiver blood which courses more or less swiftly through the veins of most Border folk, and which, now that there are no cattle to “lift” from the English side, impels them for want of better to lift from the water a salmon whenever opportunity may offer.

There was lately, it is said, a lady of ancient Border lineage, who sat one day with a grown-up daughter in the library of her ancestral home. It was the hunting season, and at intervals the two glanced anxiously from the windows in full expectation of seeing the hounds sweep in full cry over the fields of which the library commanded a view.

“They must be coming,” cried the daughter, starting up. “There’s one of the stable-boys running over the lawn.”

And, indeed, past the old trees a youth was to be seen skirting the lawn, flying down terraces, making towards a burn which ran through the grounds before joining a small tributary of Tweed. At best speed mother and daughter followed the boy, who had halted excitedly by the burn side. But what the cause of his agitation might be they could not for the moment conjecture; certainly the burn had no apparent connection with hunting, nor indeed was there sign of horse or hound. What they found was something very different. A mile or so up the rivulet there was a farm-steading, and in that steading was the usual water-driven threshing-mill. It happened that this particular day had been selected by the farmer as one on which he might advantageously thrash part of his crop. Consequently, the water from his mill pond was now making a temporary spate in the little stream, which, in the course of nature, had caused many salmon to run their noses into the burn’s unexplored meanderings. When the two ladies reached the stream’s bank, they found the stable-lad up to his knees in the water, and a fish, not over silvery, already floundering high and dry, far from its native element; in shallow, broken water, two or three others vainly struggled to gain higher latitudes.