The showers were short; the weather mild;
The Morning fresh; the Evening smil'd.
Jone takes her neat-rub'd paile, and now
She trips to milk the sand-red Cow;
Where, for some sturdy foot-ball Swaine,
Jone strokes a sillibub, or twaine.
The Fields and Gardens were beset
With Tulip, Crocus, Violet.

And now, though late, the Modest Rose
Did more than halfe a blush disclose.
Thus all look't gay, all full of Chear
To welcome the New-liver'd yeare.

What a pity that Tom Browne could not have taught his master to

"Whoop like boys, at pounders

Fairly played and grassed"

And Rugby, too, is on the sportive Shakespeare's own Avon !

Modern poets, though, like Charles Kingsley, Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, and Mr. Andrew Lang, they belong to the brotherhood, yet seem to be timorous about singing over their angles. They are cowed by the rank gibes of bustling Philistia, or perhaps they are too happy by the waterside to have leisure for their melodies, for poets do not exactly both live and sing. Poetry is the echo of life rather than its voice. Anyhow it is only now and then that we get hints of

their gentle craftsmanship. "Here and there a lusty trout, and here and there a grayling," -mostly a trout, I think-and the hint is just an off-hand touch, the far off-tinkle of melodious and falling rivers. Most of the grave men who fish, are silent about it. Yet why? The parson's parishioners reckon up his angling days against him, as they did against Mr. Irwin in Adam Bede: but he should laugh at them. He should rise above the fear of man: why else is he established in an independent position? Miserable worldlings! They actually consider a day wasted, because a man has but a few gudgeons to show for it, and not wasted if he has been inculcating the Religion in which they do not believe or the Morality they do not practise. In the latter case he has nothing at all to show for it, except maybe a sick heart and a disgusted face. O the sorry trade! Let him fish and learn patience with fools, and, if possible, some insight into life and some friendship with death.

But it is time to close this chapter and this time too it shall end in verse, which the reader may be pardoned if he choses to skip, as it is in a melancholy strain.

O ANGLER DEATH.

O Angler Death! sitting on some green shore
Above our grosser tide of air and time,
Most patient sportsman, master of thy lore,
To thee I'll dedicate my less rare rhyme,
O Angler Death!

Thou hast the lure to charm from human school
The fairest, cleanest, loveliest of our race,
Swift lifter, steadiest hand with lightest tool,
We breathe and spin and fight a little space,
O Angler Death!

And then in thy rich creel, each one is laid
Astonished, gasping in that nimbler light:
Still plays the shoal, as it has ever played
Nor voice, nor shade, nor plash, e'er gives us fright,
O Angler Death!

And some, such little fry, and some grown old
In craft and years, the harmless and the fierce
Are hooked in turn, on lines that always hold,
Which no run snaps and no sharp teeth can pierce,
O Angler Death!

He smiles. He sees the busy human prey

Intent on worms and weeds, and mud and sand, And spawn and flies. Then lifts them clean away To die in some far stranger lovelier land.

O Angler Death!

O little fishes, fellow fishes, ye

Who love to frisk it in our heavier air And just to frolic as the others do,

Raise not your eyes to him who sits up there, The Angler Death!

They say that some have swum beyond his cast

That One, the chiefest, broke his toughest line.

Nay, gaze not up at Him, for at the last

He will obliterate all mine and thine,
The Angler Death.

CHAPTER III-Roaching.

T

HERE is always a delicious uncertainty about angling, and this, perhaps, gives it some of its delicate charm and aroma.

If human contrivance could have availed this chapter would have been a most scientific one, upon the roach and how to angle for him, filled with those stiff statistics which extort admiration, and salience, from the supposed reader. It should have enlarged the sphere of human knowledge, an object which has a certain De-Wet-like evasiveness about it.

For a long time Dr. Luke had agreed with me that a careless empiricism reigned in the angling world. Haphazard and the bonds of tradition obscured intelligent knowledge. It was time that we changed all this. We would angle mathematically, and with forethought and elaborate preparations, as men who observe eclipses, or

"Find the North-West Passage out

Although the longest way about."

We resolved to begin upon the Roach,