lying.  Then there is a slow pull, a break in the water, a sudden strain at the line, which flies through the rings of the rod.  It is not well to give too much line; best to follow his course, as he makes off as if for Berwick and the sea.  Once or twice he leaps clean into the air, a flying bar of silver.  Then he sulks at the bottom, a mere dead weight, attempting devices only to be conjectured.  A common plan now is to tighten the line, and tap the butt end of the rod.  This humane expedient produces effects not unlike neuralgia, it may be supposed, for the fish is off in a new fury.  But rush after rush grows tamer, till he is drawn within reach of the gaff, and so on to the grassy bed, where a tap on the head ends his sorrows, and the colours on his shining side undulate in delicate and beautiful radiance.  It may be dreadfully cruel, as cruel as nature and human life; but those who eat salmon or butcher’s meat cannot justly protest, for they, desiring the end, have willed the means.  As the angler walks home, and watches the purple Eildon grow grey in the twilight, or sees the hills of Mull delicately outlined between the faint gold of sky and sea, it is not probable that his conscience reproaches him very fiercely.  He has spent a day among the most shy and hidden beauties of nature, surprising her here and there in places where, unless he had gone a-fishing, he might never have penetrated.  He has set his skill against the strength and skill of the monarch of rivers, and has mastered him among the haunts of fairies and beneath the ruined towers of feudalism.  These are some of the delights that to-day end for a season. {16}

WINTER SPORTS.

People to whom cold means misery, who hate to be braced, and shudder at the word “seasonable,” can have little difficulty in accounting for the origin of the sports of winter.  They need only adapt to the circumstances that old Lydian tradition which says that games of chance were invented during a great famine.  Men permitted themselves to eat only every second day, and tried to forget their hunger in playing at draughts and dice.  That is clearly the invention of a southern people, which never had occasion to wish it could become oblivious of the weather, as too many of us would like to be in England.  Such shivering and indolent folks may be inclined to say that skating and curling and wildfowl-shooting, and the other diversions which seduce the able-bodied from the warm precincts of the cheerful fire, were only contrived to enable us to forget the state of the thermometer.  Whether or not that was the purpose of the first northerner who fixed sheep-bones beneath his feet, to course more smoothly over the frozen sound, there can be no doubt that winter sports answer their presumed purpose.  They keep up that glow which only exercise in the open air can give, and promote the health which shows itself in the complexion.