"Tweed says to Till, What gars ye rin sae still? Till says to Tweed, Never ye heed; Though ye rin fast and I rin slaw, Where ye droon ae man I droon twa." We have a notion that it is the almost overwhelming rapidity of the Chapel-stream which induces such a large proportion of whitlings and even of salmon to turn aside and enter the Till in spring. At the foot of the Chapel-stream there is one of the best salmoncasts in the lower part of the Tweed. The stream we have mentioned takes its name from a chapel, once dedicated to St. Cuthbert, now a mere ruin, beautifully seated in the little haugh formed by the angle of the Tweed and Till at their junction. According to the legend, the stone coffin in which St. Cuthbert's body miraculously floated down the Tweed from Melrose on its way to Lindisfarne, came ashore here, and was preserved for centuries, until some neighbouring Goth began to use it for a pig-trough, and finally broke it. It is said-we do not know on what kind of authority-that such a shell actually existed, and, what is more, was so thin as to float in water. On a precipitous bank overlooking the mingling of Tweed and Till, stands a huge abortive structure called Tillmouth Castle. It was built, at enormous expense, thirty or forty years ago, by Sir Francis Blake, but has never been finished or inhabited. The fishing at Tweedmill belongs to the Earl of Haddington, and between that point and Norham, a distance of about four miles, the proprietors are Sir F. Blake, Mr. Home of Milngraden, and Mr. D. M. Robertson of Ladykirk. Save in exceptional seasons, when grilse are plentiful and there are no floods to induce them to run up, there is but little salmon-fishing with the rod in this part of the Tweed. A capital day's trout-fishing may, however, be had in this stretch of water, by the woody banks of Milngraden, the streams and little islands of Bendibus and the Dreeper, and the pleasant braes of Ladykirk-ending at last where "Norham's castled steep" rises gaunt and ruinous over the "fair river, broad and deep," flowing majestically onwards to the sea. Norham is an ancient border village, quiet as English country villages usually are. The angling visitor at it feels constantly overshadowed by the ancient Castle, and as he wades into the deep stream that wheels round the base of the knoll on which it stands, he of course keeps repeating to himself the fine opening lines of Marmion. High spring-tides reach Norham, but there is still good trout-fishing in the Tweed, and we have many a time filled a creel between it and Berwick. Every two or three hundred yards now, there is a netting-station, and towards the mouth of the river the stranger is amazed at the sight of tall ladders, with a box or cage on the top of them, reared on its banks. Over the edge of the box or cage a face may be detected peering steadfastly into the Tweed at the head of some shallow stream, and as a ripple-invisible to the inexperienced-marks the upward passage of a fish, the watcher pulls a string which drags an old kettle across the floor of the sheil, some fifty or a hundred yards off, where the fishermen are sleeping or mending their nets. Out rush a couple of booted Northumbrians—one jumps into the boat, and the other seizes the rope attached to the net-the boat makes its circle in the water, and it is five to one that in ten minutes the salmon is gasping on the bank. Of course there is no rod-fishing where these shots are pulled; but in rocky places, where nets cannot be wrought, where salmon or grilse are induced by drought to lie, instead of making their way up the river, the angling is sometimes excellent. We are acquainted with an angler who, we have been told, killed seventeen salmon and grilse in one autumn morning, in the stream below the Chain Bridge, about four miles above Berwick, a part of the river which the tide covers every day. At Horncliffe there are one or two casts that are always worth trying when the river is not in a state to induce salmon to run. BERWICK is a town of 13,000 inhabitants-the terminus of the main line of the North British Railway -and with all the accommodation that angler or traveller could desire.* About two miles above the town, the Tweed receives its last ally, the Whitadder. And so the Tweed is wedded with the sea. The moisture from a thousand hills-the tiny contributions of a thousand rivulets-all the waters that make glad our border-land-represented in one broad stream, pass through the arches of the old bridge of Berwick, double round Spittal Point, dash against Queen Elizabeth's pier, and, gliding swiftly outwards, are lost in the German Ocean. * For a short description of Berwick, see the " Handbook to Berwick-upon-Tweed." CHAPTER IV. ETTRICK AND YARROW. "Ettricke Foreste is a feir foreste, In it grows manie a semelie trie; The Sang of the Outlaw Murray. TTRICK FOREST is still fair-but not with seemly trees. Scanty and scrubby are now the representatives, in cleugh and on hill-side, of the ash, the birch, the alder, and the rowan-tree, that by their abundance gave the district its name and its old character-affording shelter in the remotest times, to the bear, the bison, the wolf, and the stag, to the native Britons, when the Roman conqueror had pitched his camp on the Eildons, and lorded over all he surveyed from that lofty post-in the later or historical and ballad-times to the outlaw and the reiver, and the great families of Douglas and Scott. It is still the "the Forest," however; and, although with the trees have passed away the "hart and hynd, and dae and rae," there remain the lochs, rivers, and rivulets, and their original inhabitants. The salmon hardly now penetrates to the Ettrick and Yarrow, save in breeding-time, but at that period every stream is ploughed up by spawners, and a greater number of them escape the leister than might G have been expected, for the Duke of Buccleuch vigorously interests himself in their protection. This, however, has only been of late years; and indeed, instead of wondering that the salmon should have decreased in our rivers, the marvel seems to be that they have not shared the fate of the larger feræ of the dry land. It is to be borne in mind, that notwithstanding the severity of the Scottish laws against killing breeding salmon, they must have been almost entirely inoperative, from the fact that the chief breeding-places were always beyond the reach of the law. The inhabitants of Glen Lyon or Glen Tilt were not likely to pay much respect to the "Lawland laws" that forbade the taking of the salmon in winter to give a relish to their oatmeal bannocks, and afford an alternation of kipper with their tough venison-hams. They would doubtless turn up their nostrils in supreme contempt at the idea of refraining from spearing the foul fish in order that the burghers of Dunkeld, Perth, or Dundee, might get them clean. The spawning-grounds of the Forth and Teith were in the country of the Macgregors, and these sharp-sighted children of the mist would always have an old claymore blade, or perhaps even a weapon so civilized as a leister, ready for the visitors from the Bass Rock and Inchkeith. As to the Tweed, there were, as we have seen, times—and these frequent ones -when it was declared patriotic to kill every salmon that could be got, so as to disappoint the English loons who held Berwick; and even at this date, the intelligent and moral population of Roxburghshire, Selkirkshire, and Peebleshire-sound, nay learned, as they are on all doctrinal points, and familiar from their childhood |