supper at half-past eight. Why, at home, we only have two meals in the course of the day-breakfast and dinner, for a biscuit in the middle of the day cannot be called a meal.

Tea does console us; a pipe does also console us; and after a romp with the children in the orchard, we feel happy again, though still regretting the loss of so fine a fish.

The busy murmur of the mill ceases. The dappled cows come wading through the brook to be milked; we catch a few more small trout; the sun goes down in a sea of amber, crimson splashed and spotted; the white mists wreath around the coppices of oak and fir; the bats wheel and scream in the still air, and-we go in to supper. Then there comes a rubber or two of whist, a farewell pipe, and a glass of grog; and with a fair basketful of trout, a bottle of dandelion tea in one pocket of our coat, a spring chicken in another, and laden with a posy of cowslips and primroses gathered by the children for the dear partner of our joys and purse, we shake hands with the miller and his wife, and bid good-night to the dear old mill and its inhabitants.

E

AN OCTOBER MORNING.

THE white mists of an October morning rise quietly and sluggishly, like a sleeper just awakened, from the damp meadows, the green hue of which is strewn and dashed with the yellow and grey of the long, dead bents and the faded summer grasses. The soft mysterious mist rolls slowly away, flowing down with glacial motion from the hollows of the wood, where the dead leaves lie in wet masses of tawny brown, and orange, and purply black. Down a narrow path between the tall, though broken and dying, bracken which hangs in dripping sadness over the soft path, we step with loitering tread, armed with our rod and creel. For what fish we on such a cool, still morn? For pike or lordly salmon trout or dashing perch? No, the still quietude of this windless autumn morn has seemed to us to present a favourable opportunity for the capture of some of the silver-sided roach that run in the calmer reaches of the river, winding through the valley below us; the valley that only a few minutes ago was invisible from the higher ground upon which we then stood, so enveloped was it in its shroud of mist. The valley now presents a patchwork appearance, for while the natural tints

H

of green and yellow are visible in many a place, and the river shines with the dull gleam of frosted silver between rows of shadowy willows, yet in every dip and hollow the mist clings as loath to part from its bride of the night.

We rest for a few minutes on the crooked and lichened stile at the edge of the wood to gaze at the scene below us. It is half repellent and half attractive, yet wholly beautiful with a chaste, cold beauty. The vagueness and uncertainty imparted to the breadth of meadow by the changing mists; the indistinct outlines; the strange weird mystery of the still, white river with its curving reaches, upon which the yellow leaves of the willows float in increasing numbers, are sad and uncanny; and the low bushes with their brown branches gleaming wet with the mist, and hung with myriad waterdrops, look cold and cheerless. We hesitate to leave the warmer shelter of the wood, and we look back at it with the air of one who leaves a friend for a long journey. There may be water-kelpies and elves lurking in the river valley, among the sedges and under the mantle of mist, while here in the wood there is nothing but the faint, shy rustle of the curled-up leaves as they crack from their parent branches and flutter downward into the brake and brambles, to form a thickening carpet through which the red-coated squirrel bounds with a quick patter, and the conies dash with a great flurry and disturbance of matter.