THE MICROBE 



merely deliver more fish into the shameless net of the 

 common enemy, the miller. Ergo, every fish I kill 

 with a fly, besides being a great and worthy pleasure 

 to myself, saves it from an ignominious end in the 

 miller's net.' 



Yet, in spite of this crushing logic, there were still 

 people obsessed of a time-honoured unsupported 

 superstition who regarded me as making rather free 

 when for two or three years, till we left the neighbour- 

 hood, I treated the water without molestation as my 

 preserve. And this to the oft-times contentment 

 of the household ; for Kennet trout, unlike some 

 others from neighbouring chalk streams, are pink and 

 firm and worthy of a dinner-course, not merely to 

 serve as a breakfast side-dish. In a breeze even in our 

 still water they rose fairly to a wet fly. 



I even suspected my father, who was on excellent 

 terms with the marquis, of being not without secret 

 misgivings. 



But then, though he knew a great deal about many 

 more useful and important things, he knew nothing 

 at all about trout or riparian rights. A letter from 

 him to the great man would no doubt have settled the 

 question in my favour. But this I forbore to suggest, 

 for there was an agent, and even marquises can do 

 nothing without a word at least with their factotum, 

 and I suspected this one of encouraging the pre- 

 historic traditions that a know-nothing community 

 had dumbly acquiesced in. An agent naturally dis- 

 likes the concession of small privileges, particularly 

 to a boy. Even then I knew enough to picture him 



7 



