236 AMKRICAN FISHES. 



the torrent on each hand, not leaving the slightest ledge or margin 

 between the rapids and the precipice. 



" Through this wild gorge of some fifty yards in length, the river 

 shoots like an arrow over a steep inclined plane of limestone rock, the 

 surface of which is polished by the action of the water, till it is as 

 slippery as ice, and at the extremity leaps down a sheer descent of 

 some twelve feet into a large, wide basin, surrounded by softly swell- 

 ing banks of greensward, and a fair amphitheatre of woodland. 



" At the upper end this pool is so deep as to be vulgarly deemed 

 unfathomable ; below, however, it expands yet wider into a shallow 

 rippling ford, where it is crossed by the high-road, down stream of 

 which again there is another long, sharp rapid, and another fall, over 

 the last steps of the hills ; after which the nature of the stream be- 

 comes changed, and it murmurs gently onward through a green pas- 

 toral country, unrippled and uninterrupted. 



" Just in the inner angle of the high-road, on the right hand of the 

 stream, there stood an old-fashioned, low-browed, thatch-covered, 

 stone cottage, with a rude portico of rustic woodwork overrun with 

 jasmine and virgin-bower, and a pretty flower-garden sloping down 

 in successive terraces to the edge of the basin. Beside this, there was 

 no other house in sight, unless it were part of the roof of a mill which 

 stood in the low ground on the brink of the second fall, surrounded 

 with a mass of willows. But the tall steeple of a country church, 

 raising itself heavenward above the brow of the hill, seemed to show 

 that, although concealed by the undulations of the ground, a village 

 was hard at hand. 



" The morning had changed a second time, a hazy film had crept 

 up to the zenith, and the sun wa.s now covered with a pale golden veil, 

 and a slight current of air down the gorge ruffled the water. 



" It was a capital pool, famous for being the temporary haunt of the 

 very finest fish, which were wont to lie there awhile, as if to recruit 

 themselves after the exertions of leaping the two falls and stemming 

 the double rapid, before attempting to ascend the stream farther. 



" Few, however, even of the best and boldest fisliermen, cared to 

 wet a line in its waters, in consecpicnee of the supposed impossibility 

 of following a heavy fish througli the gorge biOow, or checking him at 

 the brink of the fall. It is true, that throughout the length of tho 



