The hotel of Glen Conquhar was far from the haunts of men.  Its quiet was never disturbed by the noise of roysterers.  It was the summer home of a number of quiet people from the south—­fishing men chiefly, who loved to hear the water rushing about their legs on the edges of the deep salmon-pools of the Conquhar Water.  There was Cole, Radical M.P., impulsive and warm-hearted, a London lawyer who had declined, doubtless to his own monetary loss, to put his sense of justice permanently into a blue bag.  There was Dr. Percival, the father of all them that cast the angle in Glen Conquhar, who now fished little in these degenerate days, but instead told tales of the great salmon of thirty years ago—­fellows tremendous enough to make the spick-and-span rods of these days, with their finicking attachments, crack their joints even to think of holding the monsters.  Chiefly and finally there was “Old Royle,” who came in March, first of all the fishing clan, and lingered on till November, when nothing but the weathered birch-leaves spun down the flooded glen of the Conquhar.  Old Royle regarded the best fishing in the water as his birthright, and every rival as an intruder.  He showed this too, for there was no bashfulness about Old Royle.  Young men who had just begun to fish consulted him as to where they should begin on the morrow.  Old Royle was of opinion that there was not a single fish within at least five miles of the hotel.  Indeed, he thought of “taking a trap” in the morning to a certain pool six miles up the water, where he had seen a round half-dozen of beauties only the night before.  The young men departed, strapped and gaitered, at cock-crow on the morrow.  They fished all day, and caught nothing save and except numerous dead branches in the narrow swirls of the linn.  But they lost, in addition to their tempers, the tops of a rod or two caught in the close birch tangles, many casts of flies, and a fly-book which one of them had dropped out of his breast-pocket while in act to disentangle his hook from the underlip of a caving bank.  His fly-book and he had descended into the rushing Conquhar together.  He clambered out fifty yards below; and as for the fly-book, it was given by a mother-salmon to her young barbarians to play with in the deepest pool between Glendona and Loch Alsh.

When these young men returned, jolly Mr. Forbes, of landlords the most excellent, received them with a merry twinkle in his eye.  In the lobby, Old Royle was weighing his “take.”  He had caught two beautiful fish—­one in the pool called “Black Duncan,” and the other half a mile farther up.  He had had the water to himself all day.  These young men passed in to dinner with thoughts too deep for words.

Suddenly the quiet politics of the glen were stirred by the posting of a threatening notice, which appeared on the right across the bridge at the end of the path, along which from time immemorial the ladies of the hotel had been in the habit of straying in pairs, communing of feminine mysteries; or mooning singly with books and water-colour blocks, during the absence of the nominal heads of their houses, who were engaged in casting the fly far up the glen.