platform to get some lunch and stretch our legs a little, laying our rods down to fish for themselves, Herbert being told off to keep an eye upon them. Suddenly he rushed forward, exclaiming, "I have a bite!" and we watched him take up his rod and play a large fish. While he was doing so another float had disappeared without our knowledge, and a "scurr" of a reel and a splash in the water told us that a rod had disappeared into the pool. It dived clean out of sight, and the first we saw of it again was its top bobbing up full sixty yards out. The reel kept the butt-end under, and the top just emerged now and then as the fish ceased to pull for an instant. It was our rod-plague upon the pronouns!-not the plural "our," but the singular "our" of the author (if we use "I," we may be accused of egotism); so "we," not wishing to lose a valuable rod, rapidly undressed and plunged into the pool. We swam after the rod, and, after following it full a hundred and fifty yards, we lost sight of it. Just then the butt-end struck against our legs, and, diving down, we seized it. There were quite forty yards of line out, and the fish was still on. Now commenced a most exciting struggle. Holding the rod in the one hand, we swam with the other, and, not without some trouble, we landed ourselves, and eventually the fish, which was three pounds in weight.

A goodly heap of fish lay side by side upon the grass-seventeen in number, and all good-sized

ones. There were quite as many as we could carry, so we left off fishing and rambled about gathering wild-strawberries, chasing conies, seeking for young wood-pigeons wherewith to make a pie, and generally behaving ourselves in a very silly, boyish, yet happy way. In truth, the youngest of us was by far the sedatest, and looked down with calm superiority upon our elderly frolics.

A great part of the wood had been cut down since the old times, so that we could see away over a forest of foxglove to the wild Welsh hills. Silent and still they lay in the swift-chasing sunshine and shadow. Their lower sides were green with irregularly mapped-out fields, and dotted with lonely farm-houses, from which the smoke crept lazily upwards, or whirled downwards before a sudden gust of wind. The sheep were so distant and small that their motions were not observable, and they gave no life to the view, so that far as the eye could see all was still and lonely. A tiny village, clustered round an ancient church, seemed at that distance dead and deserted.

The hill-tops arrested the flying clouds that broke against them, and streamed up the glens like rivers with an upward current. The rounded outlines of the nearer hills changed in the distance to the bluff crags and bold projections of the Snowdon mountains. Over the valley the raven floated from his nest on the inaccessible cliff, and his shadow fell on the sunny fields below. The ordered con

fusion, the solidity and the grandeur of the many hills, and the loveliness of their intersecting glens, spoke of half-savage wildness and half-barbaric freedom; yet the denizens of those sequestered farms held themselves but as serfs in bondage to a rich landowner. They claimed the independence of the Cymri, yet bowed down slavishly to the will of their landlord-and why? Because they must live, and poverty falls with the snow in these wild hill villages, and springs up with the stones in their ploughed fields-and as poverty teaches so do they learn. So that, to him who looks under the surface, the fair freshness of the hill country is too often but a painful foil to the narrow and straitened life beneath.

We had but to turn around, and there before us, for mile on mile, stretched the greater portion of four fine counties: rich plains, massy woods, silver winding streams, and landmark hills such as the Wrekin, the Breidden, Hawkstone, Longmynd, and others. There peace and plenty reigned; and comfortable homesteads, with well-filled stackyards, spoke to the gold that came from the bosom of the earth.

Around us the wind sighed loudly in the fir-trees, and the ripples washed among the reeds. There was no sound of man or domestic animal-nothing save our own voices, and the croak of the coots, and cackle of wild-ducks, and noises in the wood which were hard to assign to their natural causes.