"Your horse's hoof tread sound too rude,
So stilly is the solitude."
Stilly! with the horns and songs from omnibusses that carry tourists, and
with yells from nymphs and swains disporting themselves in the boats.
Yarrow is only the old Yarrow in winter. Ages and revolutions must pass
before the ancient peace returns; and only if the golden age is born
again, and if we revive in it, shall we find St. Mary's what St. Mary's
was lang syne--
Ah, Buddha, if thy tale be true,
Of still returning life,
A monk may I be born anew,
In valleys free from strife,--
A monk where Meggat winds and laves
The lone St. Mary's of the Waves.
Yarrow, which flows out of St. Mary's Loch was never a great favourite of
mine, as far as fishing goes. It had, and probably deserved, a great
reputation, and some good trout are still taken in the upper waters, and
there must be monsters in the deep black pools, the "dowie dens" above
Bowhill. But I never had any luck there. The choicest stream of all was
then, probably, the Aill, described by Sir Walter in "William of
Deloraine's Midnight Ride"--
Where Aill, from mountains freed,
Down from the lakes did raving come;
Each wave was crested with tawny foam,
Like the mane of a chestnut steed.
As not uncommonly happens, Scott uses rather large language here. The
steepy, grassy hillsides, the great green tablelands in a recess of which
the Aill is born, can hardly be called "mountains." The "lakes," too,
through which it passes, are much more like tarns, or rather, considering
the flatness of their banks, like well-meaning ponds. But the Aill, near
Sinton and Ashkirk, was a delightful trout-stream, between its willow-
fringed banks, a brook about the size of the Lambourne. Nowhere on the
Border were trout more numerous, better fed, and more easily beguiled. A
week on Test would I gladly give for one day of boyhood beside the Aill,
where the casting was not scientific, but where the fish rose gamely at
almost any fly. Nobody seemed to go there then, and, I fancy, nobody
need go there now. The nets and other dismal devices of the poachers
from the towns have ruined that pleasant brook, where one has passed so
many a happy hour, walking the long way home wet and weary, but well
content. Into Aill flows a burn, the Headshaw burn, where there used to
be good fish, because it runs out of Headshaw Loch, a weed-fringed lonely
tarn on the bleak level of the tableland. Bleak as it may seem, Headshaw
Loch has the great charm of absolute solitude: there are no tourists nor
anglers here, and the life of the birds is especially free and charming.
The trout, too, are large, pink of flesh, and game of character; but the
world of mankind need not rush thither. They are not to be captured by
the wiles of men, or so rarely that the most enthusiastic anglers have
given them up. They are as safe in their tarn as those enchanted fish of
the "Arabian Nights." Perhaps a silver sedge in a warm twilight may
somewhat avail, but the adventure is rarely achieved.
These are the waters with which our boyhood was mainly engaged; it is a
pleasure to name and number them. Memory, that has lost so much and
would gladly lose so much more, brings vividly back the golden summer
evenings by Tweedside, when the trout began to plash in the
stillness--brings back the long, lounging, solitary days beneath the
woods of Ashiesteil--days so lonely that they sometimes, in the end,
begat a superstitious eeriness. One seemed forsaken in an enchanted
world; one might see the two white fairy deer flit by, bringing to us, as
to Thomas Rhymer, the tidings that we must back to Fairyland. Other
waters we knew well, and loved: the little salmon-stream in the west that
doubles through the loch, and runs a mile or twain beneath its alders,
past its old Celtic battle-field, beneath the ruined shell of its feudal
tower, to the sea. Many a happy day we had there, on loch or stream,
with the big sea-trout which have somehow changed their tastes, and to-
day take quite different flies from the green body and the red body that
led them to the landing-net long ago. Dear are the twin Alines, but
dearer is Tweed, and Ettrick, where our ancestor was drowned in a flood,
and his white horse was found, next day, feeding near his dead body, on a
little grassy island. There is a great pleasure in trying new methods,
in labouring after the delicate art of the dry fly-fisher in the clear
Hampshire streams, where the glassy tide flows over the waving tresses of
crow's-foot below the poplar shade. But nothing can be so good as what
is old, and, as far as angling goes, is practically ruined, the alternate
pool and stream of the Border waters, where
The triple pride
Of Eildon looks over Strathclyde,
and the salmon cast murmurs hard by the Wizard's grave. They are all
gone now, the old allies and tutors in the angler's art--the kind
gardener who baited our hooks; the good Scotch judge who gave us our
first collection of flies; the friend who took us with him on his salmon-
fishing expedition, and made men of us with real rods, and "pirns" of
ancient make. The companions of those times are scattered, and live
under strange stars and in converse seasons, by troutless waters. It is
no longer the height of pleasure to be half-drowned in Tweed, or lost on
the hills with no luncheon in the basket. But, except for scarcity of
fish, the scene is very little altered, and one is a boy again, in heart,
beneath the elms of Yair, or by the Gullets at Ashiesteil. However bad
the sport, it keeps you young, or makes you young again, and you need not
follow Ponce de Leon to the western wilderness, when, in any river you
knew of yore, you can find the Fountain of Youth.