It was such an one that, nigh on a hundred
years ago, Mr. Scrope caught red-handed one day on his rented salmon
water near Melrose. The man was a guileless creature from Selkirk, too
innocent, it appeared, to be able to account for the salmon flies in the
inside of his dilapidated hat, or for the 10 lb. salmon reposing in his
pocket.
"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.
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