rather helping their victims to see them in time and effect an escape. As regards other groups, our standards of beauty are not necessarily those of the fish critics, but it may perhaps be assumed that, even to the eye of a fish epicure, there can be nothing very appetising in the appearance of such eerie creatures as the angler fish, chimæra, lumpsucker, scabbard-fish, wolf-fish, red bandfish, or sunfish, to mention only a few of the uglier members of the British submarine commonwealth.

The darkness of night is, of course, in the sea as well as on land. some sort of protection for the feeble, but in both situations night hawks are apt to profit by an illusion of security and to fall upon their victims under cover of a gloom that betrayed where it should have shielded. Conger, hake and other marauders are also on the prowl during the night hours, and against such of these as hunt by scent-and my own opinion is that fishes are wonderfully adaptive in this, being guided by eye or nose as circumstances dictate-the smaller kinds have a poor chance. There is another feeding-time, however, which is in many ways safer for the weak, and that is on the falling tide. Those who angle in tidal waters know well that it is on the flood that, with few exceptions, they get their best fish. but I have noticed that the smaller individuals, the pout and pollack and whiting, often bite best on the ebb. Thus they take their turn when their elders are resting, with the advantage over night-feeding that they can see their enemy before he is upon them.

So far, then, we have seen that fishes defend themselves by almost every method known to beasts and birds. With that form of defence which consists in giving blow for blow, otherwise fighting it out until the stronger wins, I have not concerned myself, though we constantly come upon evidences of severe battle, and Orientals even amuse themselves with the fights of captive fishes kept, like gamecocks, for the purpose.

There is, however, one more trick of self-defence, familiar to naturalists in higher animal groups, though always a subject of dispute among animal psychologists, and that is the ruse of feigaing death, and thus deceiving the stronger enemy into leaving the field clear. Even brute beasts, unless they be carrion-eating hyænas, do not as a rule molest a dead body. This manner of deception has been called 'foxing,' yet some of those who know the fox best declare that it never practises such methods. The animal which undoubtedly 'foxes,' according to the testimony of

many independent observers, is the opossum of America. With the exact mental operation which induces this behaviour I am not here concerned. Some regard it as a mere cataleptic collapse under strong fear, while others accept it as a genuine deception. With some reservations, I must rank myself with the latter; and it is, therefore, particularly interesting to me to have found, as I think, a genuine instance of 'foxing' in a fish. I give the following case only for what it may be worth as evidence, but, as I do not remember to have seen any such instance previously recorded, it may be of interest. When fishing for bass in estuaries we use living sandeels, and these are kept in a floating wooden box tethered to the boat and hauled from the water whenever a fresh bait is required. On three consecutive occasions one morning last summer the bait, which I picked from the rest, lay apparently lifeless, its gill-covers hardly moving, on the palm of my hand, and, as a half-dead bait is useless for the work, I pitched the moribund sand-eel overboard. The first had no sooner touched the water than it darted off as in perfect health. The second behaved likewise. This roused my suspicions, and I purposely sacrificed the third. If the bait had not been getting scarce, or rather, perhaps, if my angling zeal had not for the moment dominated my devotion to scientific knowledge, I should have tried the fish until all were overboard. Even those three cases, however, are not, I think, quite without interest, and it would be useful to learn whether similar cases have come under the observation of any who are in the habit of live-baiting for pike with dace or gudgeon. The lowest expression of 'foxing is when one village lad lies in the road with his arm shielding his head, and another stands over him and at intervals administers a stimulating kick. Such cowardice one hardly expects to find in fishes, but a fragile sand-eel is surely excused if it declines combat with an ogre in whose palm half a dozen of its kind could lie at full length.

PROVINCIAL LETTERS.

XVI. A HOLIDAY IN WENSLEYDALE.

of

A DALE in Yorkshire is a broad valley watered by a river, as Teesdale by the Tees, Nidderdale by the Nidd, Swaledale by the Swale, Wharfedale by the Wharfe; so that Wensleydale should be the dale of the Wensley. But there is no River Wensley. Wensley-that is, Woden's Ley-is, as the word implies, a village, not a river. The river of Wensleydale is the Yore, which gives its name in Norman French disguise to the once famous Cistercian Abbey of Jorevaulx (which is only Yore Vale), just as the Rie gave its name to Rievaulx. The Yore has no reputation among English rivers, because Wensleydale has bred no poets. Its historians reckon up to its credit a long list of worthies, including a queen England, a Prince of Wales, a cardinal archbishop, three common archbishops, five bishops, three chancellors, two chief justices, besides earls, barons, and knights past reckoning; and yet, caret quia vate sacro, the River Yore is unhonoured and unsung. Never theless it has many mute, inglorious lovers. Otters love it for the fine trout it breeds. Its own dalesmen love it, and would gladly vindicate its merits on any stricken field against the dalesmen of Nidd or Swale, should they rashly challenge a contest. Painters love it for the bewitching variety of its beauty, its many moods. Old Leland in his 'Itinerary' calls it 'a ryver of a colour for the most part of soden water, by reason of the colour and the morisch nature of the soile of Wencedale, from whens it cummith.' But what is the colour of 'soden water'? Sodden or boiled water is of the same colour as fresh, if it is boiled in a clean vessel. Does 'soden' mean 'pertaining to a sod,' and so brown? That interpretation answers the fact, for the Yore is certainly brown of hue, except when in sunshine it reflects the blue of heaven, or in its higher reaches after rain, when it swirls along its narrower channel, a roaring torrent, seething not sodden; or again at Aysgarth, where it spreads over its sheets of limestone in three several 'forces,' rivalling the cataracts of the historic Nile. The Yore's main tributary is the Cover, which once gave its name to an abbey of white canons at Coverham, and still gives it to the dale which bred

the great Reformer Miles Coverdale, to whose genius is chiefly due the peculiar beauty of our English Bible. As the traveller hangs over the stone bridge at Coverham, and listens to the flow of the water over its bed of shingle, or as he climbs down one of the ghylls whose musical cascades feed the impetuous stream, the thought occurs whether the beauty of that wonderful rhythm was born of such murmuring sounds heard by the sensitive ear of the Coverdale youth.1

The long list of worthies above rehearsed who owe their distinction to being born in Wensleydale emboldens me to ask whether -for all we are an island people—there is not more inspiration for the heroic life to be found in our inland dales than on the seaboard. Which of our national heroes was born and bred in the much vaunted ozone of a seaside town or village? Even of the famous admirals celebrated by Mr. Henry Newbolt—and an admiral, if anybody, should be ocean-reared

Effingham, Grenville, Raleigh, Drake,

Benbow, Collingwood, Byron, Blake

only the last was cradled within sound of the sea. And if that be so, is it not a little wonderful that fashion should be allowed to override the healthy instinct of the people for inland places and drive them in shoals at this holiday season to the sea-side? To see a long line of people sitting disconsolate by the margin of the bitter sea-like Ariadne, but without her excuse-gazing blankly on its blank expanse day after day for a month or six weeks, is to have a vivid illustration of how essentially unintelligent is the practical genius of middle-class Englishmen. They are not happy; their wives are not happy; their children would be as happy anywhere else; nevertheless for the prescribed period they are content to suffer existence in a state of semi-coma, half reading the newspaper and half listening to nigger minstrelsy, while the sun blinds them above and the sea wind makes them sticky, as though they were in training for Yogidom and enfranchisement 'I notice that Drayton, in his spirited geography book in verse called the Polyolbion, speaks of the Cover as a clear rill.'

Cover, a clear rill,

Next cometh into Yore, whereas that lusty chace

For her loved Cover's sake doth lovingly embrace.

'Clear' it is, but in spate it is far from being a rill. The Cover flows into the Yore in Mr. Scrope's park, below Middleham.

from the external world. Surely to behave thus is to misconceive the art of holiday-making. If recuperation and the return to nature' be the fundamental aim of a holiday it is reasonable to seek it in conditions which the modern life of cities tends to make difficult that is to say, not in noisy torpor, but in rest for the nerves and activity for the limbs. On one of the torrid nights at the end of July, as I sat on the roof of my house in London, thirsting for cool air and stillness, the noises of the street beat themselves into a sort of rhythm in my head as follows:

I sit on the leads in the heat
And dark, and I fancy I know
The worst of the tortures of Hell:
No silence, all sounds that appal-
The shout of the fool in the street,
The pad of cab horses that go
For ever, the bicycle bell,

The click of the billiard ball.

Nature, speaking through my unpoetical lips, went on to say in a figure (but the rhymes have escaped me), 'Make haste and flee from this Babel into the wilderness;' and in gratitude I record my experience that Wensleydale has proved as recuperative to broken nerves as the desert of Horeb to the prophet Elijah. At this moment I am lying with my simple cake (though no prophet), after a morning's quiet saunter through the heather, looking down over the dale where a bend of the river far below shines like a blue sickle among the green pastures; and the occasional stone dwellings, among the farms and woodland climbing up the other side of the valley, have that exquisite tint of grey in the sunlight with which Pugin painted them in Ackermann's illustrated books. To see such simple colour enamelled to brilliancy under a clear sky, and to hear no sound but the cries of quite ordinary sheep made plaintive by distance, is (for a town-dweller at least) to renew the old Paradise.

I suppose the true test of a successful holiday is whether it has increased the human stock of cheerfulness. The tangled nerves and torpid liver which city life breeds beget in turn that deadly sin which the wise old monks named acedia, an indisposition to be pleased or to give pleasure; whereas, on the other hand (we have Wordsworth's authority for the doctrine 1), cheerfulness accu

'I must point out in passing—for the fact is significant—that the poet formulated this theory from the experience of a holiday of his own, spent not by the sea side, but on the banks of the river Wye. And what is true of the Wye should be true of the Yore and other rivers.