Note.—The following sketch has, locally speaking, no place in the present collection. But since it is somewhat similar in its nature to the others, since it describes a day's fishing with the well-known angler to whom the book is dedicated, and since, moreover, it serves to mark the interval which elapsed between the time when the foregoing and succeeding sketches were written, I nevertheless introduce it.

There is a wind which belongs only to spring mornings and they are chary of it. Soft, and yet fresh, if winds were subject to the condition of age, this one might be supposed to be in its first sunny childhood. It has no care nor business. If it blew with all its strength it could never stir a mill-sail, or set a ship in motion. A butterfly rides out its silken gales, and its boldest blast, like the whispered secret of a child, beguiles you of an involuntary smile. Imagine such a breeze fitfully exploring the Winchester Water Meads. Now it hesitates, now lingers, now pauses altogether; anon with a dainty tinkling of herbage resumes its progress. And a fair march it has.

Once more the sumptuary laws of winter have been repealed, the fashions of a new rÉgime adopted. The time has come when "the fields catch flower." Tall buttercups, and dandelions, and knots of the great marsh marigold strew the thick grass with ingots of gold. Myriads of daisies and "milkmaids" powder it with snowy flakes. "Welshman's buttons" and anemones fill every sheltered nook, and stud the borders of each turf-cut drain. Here and there an early plume of sorrel shows like a vein of rust in this floral mosaic work, and each blade or flower, still wet with dew, flashes brilliantly in the sunlight as it trembles in sweet air.

On all sides the air is thrilling with the full melody of larks. A couple of plovers, that are nesting in the neighbourhood, wheel and turn with plaintive cries aloft; and a solitary cabbage butterfly, the melancholy forerunner of its clan, wanders away across the water towards Winnal moors in quest of fellows.

But marigolds and "milkmaids," larks and solitary butterflies aside! The Itchen and its trout are at hand, the rod is ready, and the momentous question is: "The fly?"

The swifts and swallows are ranging high, or at any rate totally ignoring the stream, sufficient proof that there is but little of entomological interest for them on the water.

"There's a rise!" ejaculates my companion, however, "and there's another. But they are only feeding on larvÆ."

Fish are rising occasionally without absolutely breaking the water, and it is evident that their attention is devoted not to the casual insects floating on the surface, but to the larvÆ ascending from the river bed, which they seize before they reach the upper world. We catch a specimen of the full-fledged fly (a Light-Olive), and, having matched it closely in the fly-book, commence operations.

It is ticklish work, this Hampshire trout fishing. Long education has developed in the natives of these waters a degree of sagacity that is almost supernatural. Their appreciation of the faintest nuance of exaggeration in colour of wing or body, in the artificial flies offered them, is unerring.

Time was, when to take six or seven brace of fish was a common occurrence. But in the memory of chalk-stream habituÉs there has been a gradual and steady diminution in angling averages; and now, unless the trout have a silly interval, a brace and a half or two brace is a good day's sport, and to catch these demands far greater knowledge, and the exercise of far more skill and patience than was formerly dreamt of. Then men walked boldly along the river bank, and fished with ordinary tackle and a wet fly. Now, albeit the flies used are miracles of diminutive workmanship, the gut a filament of fineness, that, with any consideration for its strength, can scarcely be reduced, to stalk and capture a two-pound trout necessitates the use of a dry fly, and a degree of caution and address scarcely less than is required for successful moose hunting.

As the best fly-fisherman in Hampshire said to me: "You want to put the exact fly just over your fish the first time, if he doesn't take it he doesn't mean to. By changing flies, and sticking to him half the day, you may worry him into an indiscretion, but it is a hundred to one that you are only educating him."

What fishing will eventually become in these streams it is difficult to imagine, for the decrease in sport arises from no reduction in the stock of fish, which are more numerous now than they ever were.

To-day I am not wielding the rod, but act merely as gillie for a master of the art, on whom the mantle of old Isaac Walton has descended. Gradually we work up stream, trying to convert these Winnal incarnations of perversity from their unholy appetite for larvÆ, with exquisite imitations of various Olives and of the Red Quill. But they remain obdurate. They come, but come short. They roll up and leisurely inspect the fly, and with not less contemptuous deliberation turn tail upon it.

At length a far cast under the opposite bank is followed by a slight break in the water, a quick tension of the line, and a good fish is in difficulty. But almost immediately the point of the rod flies up, and, owing to the knot attaching the gut to the eyed hook having drawn, the fish escapes.

And yet, methinks, with the "poetry of earth," something is mingled now that sounds not like the music of waters, the song of birds, or the fluttering of a butterfly's wings—no, nor was it a hymn in praise of tackle-makers' carelessness. Let us hope that the "recording angel" for the day was once a keen sportsman, and appreciated, therefore, the extenuating circumstances of the case. Eventually the fly is replaced, and the campaign continued.

By lunch-time we reach one of the wooden shanties, with which it is becoming the custom on these streams to provide for temporary shelter. There is not a fish moving, and for the present it is useless to flog the water. Sandwiches and a pipe fill the interlude; and by-and-by the keeper, a shrewd, wooden-visaged, terrier-looking countryman, suddenly drops upon us (after the fashion of keepers), as it were, from the clouds. Locke, in his way, is a type, and his utterances occasionally have a refreshing dryness.

"Marning sir, marning sir," he says cheerily, laying a six-pound jack on the grass to leeward of the hut (for wind spoils the look of fish), and depositing his "rod," a bamboo pole furnished with wire noose, beside it. "Have you caught anything?"

"No, nothing; it's too bright."

"It is so; 'sides, the rise was over afore you come. I eyed you coming with my glass. There was a few fish feeding 'tween nine and ten this marning. I wish you'd been here."

"We came in for the tail of the rise. How did you get the jack?"

"I noosed un, sir, I allus nooses 'em. You can't get 'em out with the net, they's too artful. They lies right close on the ground, and lets the net rub over 'em."

Incited to continue, Locke plunges into a dissertation on the art of snaring jack, against which he is very naturally the sworn foe. He proudly recounts how he one day removed eighteen of these cannibals from his water, and, on another occasion, snared a leviathan of nineteen pounds eight ounces. Every now and then producing from an inner pocket a small telescope, the lens of which he polishes on his velveteen cuff, he pauses to reconnoitre suspiciously some distant figures in Nun's Walk, near which he has a small backwater full of "store" trout, that cause him a good deal of anxiety.

"In fact," he continues, a little abstractedly, after one of these surveys, "they's reg'lar reptiles, they jack, and you can't never quite get rid of 'em. You has to keep 'em down. I'm allus looking for 'em. Now, maybe, you won't believe me, sir, when I tell you that, that there little bit of backwater alongside Nun's Waark gives me moore trouble than all this here put together. I'll just take a cast round there, and see what they chaps there is about. Don't you leave none of your things lying about wheere they Herefords can get at 'em," he warns us, as he prepares to move off, indicating some white-faced cattle grazing in the neighbourhood. "They's moore destructive than our beasts about here. They'll chew up a mackintosh, or a basket—anything. Now, maybe, you won't believe what I'm going to say, sir, but they eat up my coat once—moleskin it war—and my dinner was in the pockets. Walking pikes I calls they Herefords."

Beyond St. Catherine's Hill heavy rain clouds, fringed with long "drifting locks," are passing slowly across the scene, and a few drops of the shower reach us. But in a little while the magnificent skyscape of mountainous cumuli, mellowing in the afternoon light, regains its brilliancy, and my energetic companion marches off by himself, convinced that he had put up "the fly" at last. As for me I remain smoking on a rail, lazy and unambitious no doubt, but supremely contented. Perhaps my appreciation of the moment's ease is not a little enhanced by watching another laboriously drying his fly, and crouching low as he creeps along the bank. And so I sit, and let my glance go wandering across the meads to the big elms, over against Nun's Walk and Abbots Barton Farm, where crowded cities of rooks may be seen, the movements of whose black inhabitants are clearly distinguishable in the half-naked boughs; and on and on to scalloped ranks of trees in the farther distance, that, in the scanty foliage of the season, stand out against the horizon like fret-work fans; till, finally, by many a hedge, and field, and ditch, I come back to the river-side again.

The silvery whisper of this spring's young rushes mingles with the harsher rustling of last year's dead blades, and the softened sleepy wash of water at a hatch-hole hard by. Locke says he took a five-pound trout out of that little hatch-hole some years ago, and though of course I believe him, I cannot help casually wondering whether—as an old hunter in Alaska once cautiously added to a choice yarn that he had been telling me about a three-headed fish—"he was the only man who saw it"? With its swelling spaces of glassy smoothness, mantling with opalescent gleams of colour, with its glittering arabesque and tracery of swirl and ripple, its tiny, short-lived surface whirlpools, the full-bosomed river glides by, bearing its now rapidly accumulating cargo of fly. And in serried hosts the swifts and swallows have congregated above its course, and are busy skirmishing to and fro there. Now mingling and now scattering, crossing and recrossing one another, they clamber up against little currents of wind, and poise themselves, then dive, and skim the surface of the water, daintily picking therefrom fly after fly, and rarely making that slight fault which breaks the deep tones in the distance of the river's reach, with a small fan-shaped flash of silver spray! The fly is up! By twos and threes they came at first, but hundreds inadequately number the unbroken swarms that now cover the water, and Olives of every shade dance past from ripple to ripple in alluring pageantry.

In the whole range of Nature there is probably nothing more exquisitely, coquettishly graceful, than are these water insects. With the stamp of refinement that marks the typically aristocratic maiden, they somehow combine the traditional piquancy of the French actress in opera bouffe. Nothing can possibly appear more appetising. But these epicurean fish are spoiled. The splendid condition they show at this early season of the year proves that they are overfed; and even under the temptation of such a banquet as the present, they indulge with more or less deliberation.

We are fishing a plain canal-looking piece of water—a kind of upper-school, only frequented by fish of good size, and under a dishevelled tuft of brown rushes on the opposite bank a trout is feeding, taking with the regularity of clock-work about three flies a minute. The little gleam of transparent wings can be seen approaching the fatal spot, undulating with the motion of the tide. There is a slight disturbance on the surface, a subdued rich "gulp" is heard, and a few expanding rings are drifting from the scene of the disaster, whilst the course of the hapless fly is pursued by a short-lived bubble. Again and again the tragedy is repeated, and, at length, opportunely substituted for the genuine delicacy, a Light-Olive of silk, feathers, and steel floats over the swirl that marks the masked lair. There is a sudden commotion, a tremendous splashing, and a second later a good fish is making a determined rush for a neighbouring sanctuary of heavy weed. It is a question of pull devil, pull baker. If he reach the weed, he will inevitably escape with the fly and half the collar, and in the absolute necessity of stopping him the butt is forcibly applied and a breakage risked at once. Fortunately the fine tackle stands the strain, and, foiled in his purpose, the trout turns suddenly and shoots down stream at a pace that makes the reel sing merrily. For a little while now he sulks in deep water, but, brought to the surface, catches sight of us and darts across the river, following this effort up by a succession of short and savage dashes. Some nice steering and manipulation coax him safely through a dangerous archipelago of weed, and then, though with lowered head, he still endeavours to plough on down stream, the constant strain of tackle begins to tire him. From time to time he yields temporarily to the power that turns him open-jawed against the current, and at length, almost a hundred yards below where he first was hooked, a two-pound-and-a-half fish, in the perfection of beauty and condition, glides into the net. He had fought so gallantly that he deserved to escape.

Before the rise ceases another fish, of within an ounce of two pounds, completes our brace. Then a long period of tranquillity ensues, and it becomes evident that if the trout move again to-day it will be in the evening, and for the evening fishing we do not intend to wait. Pausing to make an occasional cast over a likely spot, therefore, we work back towards Winchester.

In a mood of exquisite serenity the last phase of afternoon is closing. There is no wind. The sky is filled with soft gold and silver clouds, dimmed by transparent veils of pearliest gray. Black rooks plodding lazily homewards are relieved against its pure tones, and an occasional couple of duck cross its broad fields with strenuous haste that jars oddly with the ineffable calm up there. Upreared in virtual isolation, Winchester Cathedral stretches its great length on the town like a stranded whale—possessed, though, of a majestic dignity and repose that I am afraid the simile does not convey. A curious contrast exists between its massive tower and the sharp, pretentious little spires of the modern churches near it, which seem to be tiptoeing enviously to attract unmerited attention. By his works shall a man be known. Does the difference in the style of these buildings indicate any parallel change in the character of the race that raised them?