My own progress was now checked for long by a constitutional and insuperable aversion to angling with worm.  If the gardener, or a pretty girl-cousin of the mature age of fourteen, would put the worm on, I did not “much mind” fishing with it.  Dost thou remember, fair lady of the ringlets?  Still, I never liked bait-fishing, and these mine allies were not always at hand.  We used, indeed, to have great days with perch at Faldonside, on the land which Sir Walter Scott was always so anxious to buy from Mr. Nichol Milne.  Almost the last entry in his diary, at Naples, breathes this unutterable hope.  He had deluded himself into believing that his debts were paid, and that he could soon “speak a word to young Nichol Milne.”  The word, of course, was never spoken, and the unsupplanted laird used to let us fish for his perch to our hearts’ desire.  Never was there such slaughter.  The corks which we used as floats were perpetually tipping, bobbing, and disappearing, and then the red-finned perch would fly out on to dry land.  Here I once saw two corks go down, two anglers haul up, and one perch, attached to both hooks, descend on the grassy bank.  My brother and I filled two baskets once, and strung dozens of other perch on a stick.

But this was not legitimate business.  Not till we came to fly-fishing were we really entered at the sport, and this initiation took place, as it chanced, beside the very stream where I was first shown a trout.  It is a charming piece of water, amber-coloured and clear, flowing from the Morvern hills under the limes of an ancient avenue—­trees that have long survived the house to which, of old, the road must have led.  Our gillie put on for us big bright sea-trout flies—­nobody fishes there for yellow trout; but, in our inexperience, small “brownies” were all we caught.  Probably we were only taken to streams and shallows where we could not interfere with mature sportsmen.  At all events, it was demonstrated to us that we could actually catch fish with fly, and since then I have scarcely touched a worm, except as a boy, in burns.  In these early days we had no notion of playing a trout.  If there was a bite, we put our strength into an answering tug, and, if nothing gave way, the trout flew over our heads, perhaps up into a tree, perhaps over into a branch of the stream behind us.  Quite a large trout will yield to this artless method, if the rod be sturdy—­none of your glued-up cane-affairs.  I remember hooking a trout which, not answering to the first haul, ran right across the stream and made for a hole in the opposite bank.  But the second lift proved successful and he landed on my side of the water.  He had a great minnow in his throat, and must have been a particularly greedy animal.  Of course, on this system there were many breakages, and the method was abandoned as we lived into our teens, and began to wade and to understand something about fly-fishing.