CLEAR WATERS 



had been wont to excite. For some quite inexplicable 

 reason I would almost have sacrificed my chance of 

 the first eleven, for which I was at the moment strug- 

 gling, to have been in my young friend's place and to 

 have followed that burly figure with the rod and 

 creel to the riverside, though I had but the vaguest 

 notion of his procedure when he got there. Beyond 

 a doubt it was the microbe stirring again. Then 

 there was nothing more till a year or so later, when I 

 ran into a hotbed of the disease and the complaint 

 broke out. 



For, to dispense with metaphor, I found myself 

 domiciled in a snug rectory upon the slopes of Exmoor. 

 It was a cold February. I remember the snow lay 

 deep and frozen on the moor, and the stream, of a 

 type different from any I had ever seen, gurgled like 

 a black twisting thread through the white vale below 

 the house. But in due course March suns and balmy 

 winds unthawed the rigid earth, the snow vanished, 

 the valley became greener than any valley I had ever 

 seen in early spring, and there was everywhere a 

 strange and delicious murmur of bubbling and tink- 

 ling waters. A mountain rivulet fashioned to a 

 mimic cataract plashed noisily beneath my bedroom 

 window night and day. From the Wiltshire Downs 

 and the Isle of Wight to Exmoor was almost a change 

 of continents to a child. From the typical south to 

 the most extreme type of the west, to an observant 

 impressionable youngster, was almost like crossing the 

 Atlantic to a grown-up. The Exmoor rectory, how- 

 ever, soon became a paradise. Early regrets for the 

 gregarious joys of school life were forgotten. The in- 



lO 



