as is compatible with efficiency. But he needs an eye and brain trained, as only fieldsports can train the eye and brain, and a quick, deft hand, well-lubricated muscles, a pretty taste in shades and colours, and, above all, a mind open to sweet thoughts, fine literature, and rich landscape.

"O glorious he, beyond

His daring peers! when the retreating horn
Calls them to ghostly halls of grey renown,
With woodland honours graced."

If he catch nothing else, he can take health in his angle, and be certain of getting a Nordracht cure to his diseases in the gayest and least banished way. He has a continual gallery of pictures before his eyes, any one of which is worth a shilling and a Bond street headache, neither of which he has to pay. The colouring of valleys and lowlands is infinitely richer than that of mountains, up which skipjacks delight to rush aimlessly, and from which the dædal earth looks merely like a map, and a very dull map too. Mountains are admirable to look at, no doubt. That is their æsthetic purpose, but they are God's garden wall, and it is an urchin's trick to climb and tumble upon them. In their chill air colour

gets less vivid.

Blacks and whites indeed glare upon us, but they are a poor, dry, barren-breasted refuge for us sons of the valley. The "calm rivers, lakes, and seas,' on the other hand, are the inheritors of all that is richest, loveliest, and sweetest of the mountains. They are waited upon by mountains, who stand and serve rather than command. "Great thoughts" may be born, "when men and mountains meet," if they meet at a decent distance, but mountaineers do not breed great thoughts. They rather run to greatness of calf. Wordsworth taught us too unreal and too slavish an attitude towards mountains, because he rescued his Westmoreland hills from an undeserved neglect, but the best thought of the world has come to folk with an obbligato of moving waters. Your New Jerusalem itself is on a crystal sea, not perched upon a windy hill. The angler's chief outfit must be some understanding of the religiousness, the life-breeding power, and the loveliness and the exalted agency of water. It was water upon which the Holy Ghost brooded, not mountains. Water escaped the primal curse. For every rocky, knobbly, unwashed hill poem you can produce, I will find a hundred liquid numbers

about the moving lustral waters of the earth. Mountains divide, but rivers co-operate with men, serve us, unite, clean, feed, and refresh us. If all the mountains of the world were worn down into mud-banks, we could still thrive, whereas without the streams that make her glad, the earth would be a Sahara, or a dessicated moon, which latter is probably the Purgatory of Alpine Clubmen. Here is an extract from Henry Vaughan,

the Swan of Usk, his Waterfall.

"Dear stream! dear bank, where often I
Have sate, and pleas'd my pensive eye;
Why, since each drop of thy quick store
Runs thither whence it flow'd before,
Should poor souls fear a shade or night,
Who came (sure) from a sea of light?
Or, since those drops are all sent back
So sure to thee that none doth lack,
Why should frail flesh doubt any more
That what God takes He'll not restore?"

This man Vaughan is worth studying, not only for his brookside musings, for the "sublime truths and wholesome themes" which he espies to be solvent in "mystical deep streams," but because he had that delight in the flavours of Nature, which Wordsworth mostly talked about, sometimes gloriously, more often boreingly, but which his numbing

egoism prevented him from having half so much as he would have liked, and indeed, tried and professed to have.

The vulgar put the virtue of patience as chief among the angler's outfit; and, like any any other human avocation, angling no doubt demands this virtue. But not pre-eminently. The too patient man will sit upon his monument smiling at grief, his angle a yard from the very shelf whereupon multitudes are feeding. He will nurse hope when his hook is naked. What he lacks in practice, or in reason, he will try to make up in hope. If they do not bite soon, believe me, sir, you had best change the bait, or the venue, or keep more out of sight or plumb, try deeper or shallower, get nearer to the weeds, cast your fly under the bridge, or just below the stickle. You are stuffed with superstitions. Because you made a bag here in January, you will sit out the blaze of an August day in patience, not reflecting that they are all in the shallows now. The succulent weeds, swarming with insects, give them food and shelter too. Because they took marsh worms in a south wind and thick water, you offer marsh worms now the wind is east and the water low. Don't plead patience. Patience

is a pretty maid, but she is not able to do the whole work of the house. It is unfair to press it upon her. By all means let us take her out with us, but we anglers have no more and no less work for her to do than have golfers, ploughboys and dentists.

THE PLAINT OF PATIENCE.

O race of sweaters, cruel men
Who undertake me now and then,
Like simple Simon pay me court
To make your fortunes out of nought.
Does any feed the perch with bread?
Or splash about when chubs have fed?
Or angling where the net has passed
Expect to see the pounders grassed?
Or armed with meat-hooks passing thick
And hawsers-still expect the pick?
Such calls on me with insolence
To supplement his lack of sense.
Dear Sir, (or Madam, mostly Sir),
Hence, not so close, you greatly err.
True, I'm a servant, who can hale
Down oaks, or empires, and unveil
The closest secrets of the dead,
Or those who masquerade instead.
Yet do not bid me gather up
The oak tree in the acorn cup:
Turn rotten states to fervent youth
Recapture once enlarged truth.
Give me my æons and I'll try

How hens will swim and pigs will fly