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“Oh-h! mother!” cried the daughter excitedly.

And said the elder lady with little hesitation:

“Get them out, Jim; get them out. We’ll kipper them.” Then, after a thoughtful pause: “I think I’d like to catch one myself.”

So into the water she plunged, and the three–the lady and her daughter and the stable-boy–were so busily and excitedly plowtering in the burn, engaged in this most nefarious and illegal capture of fish, that they failed to hear or to see that hounds and a full field had swept over the hill in front, and had checked, in full view of them, at a small strip of wood in their immediate neighbourhood; in fact, there was little doubt these poachers must, a few minutes before, have headed the fox. Most embarrassing of all, however, was the fact that amongst the riders was one in immaculate pink, whose face flushed a deeper shade than his coat as he pulled up not a hundred yards distant. For what must be the feelings of a Justice of the Peace, of strictest principles, who, without warning, lights upon the wife of his bosom, his innocent daughter, and one of his servants, all engaged in the most barefaced poaching?

“Good Gedd!” he was heard to say–if indeed the words were no stronger–as, mercifully, the hounds picked up the scent again at that moment, and the chase swept on.

There are none so blind as those who will not see, however, and nothing more was ever heard of this episode. But report has it that the lord of that manor has no great partiality for kippered salmon.

But salmon-poaching is perhaps not entirely confined to the human species. There have been instances known where dogs have been the most accomplished of poachers–generally, it must be said, in conjunction with a two-legged companion. The lurching, vagabond hound that one sees not infrequently in certain parts of the country, following suspicious-looking characters clad in coats with suspiciously roomy pockets, might, no doubt, be easily trained to take salmon from burns, or from the shallow water into which, in the autumn, the fish often run. And, to the present writer’s mind, a black curly-coated retriever recalls himself as a poacher of extreme ability. A most lovable dog was “Nero,” but–at least as regards salmon–he was a most immoral breaker of the law. It was well, perhaps, that he lived in days when water-bailiffs were neither so numerous, nor so strict in the execution of their duties, as they now are, for nothing could cure him of the habit, when he saw a fish struggling up a shallow stream, of dashing in, seizing that salmon in his teeth, and laying it at the feet of his embarrassed master, who, far from being connected with the poaching fraternity, was, indeed, a magistrate, to whom the gift of a salmon in such circumstances brought only confusion.

After all, is there not generally a something lovable in the man who poaches purely for sport’s sake? Who can fail to mourn the end of poor, harmless, gallant, drucken Jocky B—-, who gave his life for his love of what he conceived to be sport? “Here’s daith or glory for Jocky,” he cried, when the watchers surrounded him, leaving but the one possibility of escape. And in that swollen, wintry torrent into which he plunged, the Bailiff Death laid hands on Jocky. Perhaps even now in the shades below, his “ghost may land the ghosts of fish”; mayhap, with a cleek such as that to which his cold fingers yet stiffly clung when they found him in the deep pool, he may still, now and again, be permitted with joyous heart to lift from the waters that ripple through Hades spectral fish of fabulous dimensions.

Salmon do not now appear to be so numerous in Tweed as apparently they were eighty or a hundred years ago; it is said that in 1824, when the nets had been off the lower reaches of the river for the Sunday, sometimes as many as five hundred salmon and grilse would be taken at Kelso of a Monday morning by the net and coble. It is a prodigious haul of fish. One’s mouth, too, waters as one reads of the numbers that were in those days taken in most stretches of the river by rod and line–though probably a goodly number of them were kelts.