SALMON FISHING. 231 



tlirust carelessly through the baud. He wore neither cloak nor isword, 

 though it was a period at which gentlemen rarely went abroad without 

 these, their distinctive attributes ; but in the broad black belt wliich 

 girt his rounded waist he carried a stout wood-knife with a buckhuin 

 hilt ; and over his shoulder there swung from a leathern thong a large 

 wicker fishing-basket. 



" Nothing, indeed, could be simpler or less indicative of any parti- 

 cular rank or station in society than young St. Aubyn's garb, yet it 

 would have been a very dull and unobservant eye which should take 

 him for aught less than a high-born and high-bred gentleman. 



" His fine intellectual face, his bearing erect before heaven, the 

 graceful ease of his every motion, as he hurried down the flagged stops 

 of the terrace, and planted his light foot on the dewy greensward, all 

 betokened gentle birth and gentle associations. 



" But he thought nothing of himself, nor cared for his advantages, 

 acquired or natural. The long and heavy salmon-rod which he carried 

 in his right hand, in three pieces as yet unconnected, did not more 

 clearly indicate his purpose than the quick marking glance which he 

 cast toward the half-veiled sun and hazy sky, scanning the signs of the 

 weather. 



" ' It will do, it will do,' he said to himself, thinking as it were 

 aloud, ' for three or four hours at least ; the sun will not shake off those 

 vapors before eight o'clock at the earliest, and if he do come out then 

 hot and strong, I do not know but the water is dark enough after the 

 late rains to serve my turn a while longer. It will blow up, too, I think, 

 from the westward, and there will be a brisk curl on the pools. But 

 come, I must be moving, if I would reach Darringford to breakfast.' 



" And as he spoke he strode out rapidly across the park toward the 

 deep chasm of the stream, ci-ushing a thousand aromatic perfumes from 

 the dowy wild-flowers with his heedless foot, and thinking little of the 

 beauties of nature, as he hastened to the scene of his loved exercise. 



" It was not long, accordingly, before he reached the brink of the 

 steep rocky bank above the stream, which he proposed to fish that 

 morning, and paused to select the best place for descending to the 

 water's edge. 



It was, indeed, a striking and romantic scene as ever met the eye 

 of paint'r or of poet. On the farther sid^ of the gorge, scarcely a hun- 



