doubt the men would, as they say, take me out again for nothing, could I stay another day.

All things pleasant have an end. Through a little careless steering the boat has fallen off from the wind, without the sheet being loosened, and a sudden gust striking with great force the flat surface of the sail, the mast gives way-being, I suppose, rather rotten-and, breaking off close by the thwart, goes overboard with a crash. The helm is put hard over in an instant, but the hamper of the fallen sail prevents her head coming up to the wind, so I get out an oar and pull her stern to leeward while the men get the wreck in. It was very nearly a capsize, and I have kicked off my boots to be ready for a swim. Happily that was not needed; but our mackerel fishing is cut short, and, as the sea is too heavy for rowing at the pace required, we run into a quiet cove for shelter. There I leave them and walk back to Borth along the top of the cliff.

Home again now, leaning out of the carriage window to take my last whiff of the sea; we speed back through the wooded valleys and level cornlands, reaching too soon the hot and stuffy town.

XXV.

THE ANGLER'S WINTER

WHEN the landscape is a "watercolour-painter's landscape "that is, when Autumn browns and reds and yellows take the place of the summer green, which, while it is so charming in its freshness in the country itself, is so strangely wanting in beauty in a picture—the angler's work is nearly done. No longer does he ramble fly rod in hand by the purling trout-stream, down which float, instead of May-flies, the brown dead leaves. The trout, so plump and bright-scaled in the spring and summer, are now becoming "long and lank and brown," as their spawning season draws near. Regretfully the trusty wand is laid up in its winter quarters, after being well oiled for protection against extreme dryness. For want of this precaution I have known many a rod snap in the most unaccountable

manner when first used the following season.

Look

ing through one's fly book at the array of tried and well-proved lures; the polish taken off them as an angler loves to see it, the gut frayed and limp; what memories do they not recall! This one caught you that heavy basket of red-spotted beauties on that mild spring day, when the gentle south wind wafted white cloudlets across the sky and mellowed the sun glare, and raised a ripple on the still deeps that made every part fishable when it was a perfect luxury to be out in the fresh spring beauty and by the side of a river which flowed so musically over its clean pebbly beds and between its worn old rocks: when the little cascades gleamed silvery white, and the eddies beneath them whirled about the snowlike foam, and then shot away in streams of sheeny blue and purple and black: when, above all, the river was alive with trout; splashes all over the surface where the trout leaped at the dancing gnats; quiet circles where the drowning March-browns were sucked quietly in; and now and then the heavy plunge of a big fish. Most actively at work all the day long! yet there was time to feel the outward beauty. Although the arm and wrist ached sorely, yet it was impossible to leave off until the night shadows came on. Look at this rough greenbodied fly with a black hackle sparingly twisted around

it! Do you not remember when that was made—and used for the first and only time?-Shut your eyes, and it all comes before you as plainly as if a painter had limned it. The hot, bright day-so hot and bright, that it was hard to find coolness or shade anywhere. The river low and clear, and the fish most decidedly not on the feed. You are sitting on a sloping slab of limestone, the lower end of which is laved by the water. Above you is a high steep rock which gives you welcome shade, and is festooned with ferns,— harts-tongue, and maiden-hair, in luxuriant clusters. On the grey limestone and the vivid green vegetation the corruscating reflections of light from the sparkling wavelets play like myriads of fairy shuttles shooting to and fro and weaving a brilliant web. On a boulder in midstream a dipper sits, ever and anon making a dive into the stream and reappearing a yard or so above the stone, and floating back to it to resume its position. Happy dipper! so cool this hot day, and enjoying a bathe without the trouble of undressing. Suddenly a caterpillar falls pat on the water from a tree overhead. Writhing in evident discomfort at his sudden change of element, he is carried away by the stream. All at once there is a regular "boil" in the water as a big trout rushes at him! The hint is not lost. As you fail to find another caterpillar, you make

K

the best imitation you can from the materials in your fly book; and the big trout, trusting to secure another tasty morsel, rises incautiously at it, and finds that he has "caught a tartar." This black hackle enticed a hungry salmon whom you were not seeking to capture, and your slight trout rod had its work cut out to land him. That white fluffy fly brought to basket the famous trout which used to lurk beneath the buttresses of the grey old bridge, and defied scores of anglers who from the roadway above had spent hours and hours employing their most seductive wiles. But you, in the still summer evening when the gloaming was darkening the valley, half waded half swam to the ledge of rock at the foot of the massive buttress, and while from the deep dark pool sounded faint but numerous splashes of rising fish, you quietly and cautiously dibbed" your white moth" on the water, and secured the four-pounder, which half the population of the little village came to see the next day, and you walked about, the hero of the hour.

Such reveries and memories will turn the veriest winter's day into summer; but not all the angler's winter is so passed. In late autumn and early winter are still, mild days when such leaves as have still to fall, fall straight down to the ground, neither wafted this way nor that by the faintest breath of wind. The