THE MICROBE 



sacred to the net of this unspeakable miller, who sent 

 big fat trout round to his patrons and friends ; for at 

 least there was nothing sordid in his otherwise, as I 

 then regarded it, disreputable proceeding. When 

 first the real significance of that two hundred yards, 

 of which one bank was ours, burst upon my awakened 

 senses, I was considerably chilled by our venerable 

 rector, who had once been a fly-fisherman, assuring 

 me that Kennet trout would not rise to the fly above 

 a certain point two miles down stream, and this I 

 think was the local tradition. An utter myth of 

 course, incredible to the modern understanding, and 

 as I very soon satisfied myself by the simplest of 

 methods and a mere wet fly, absurd in itself. But I am 

 pretty sure that no fly at that date had ever been thrown 

 above Marlborough. What between the miller and 

 his mediaeval rights and the marquis, whose benignant 

 but still awesome sway then rested on all that country, 

 I don't think it had ever entered into anybody's head, 

 even if they had a stretch of bank from which to cast 

 a line upon that sacred stream. So it was with a 

 shout of amazement and indignation that the miller's 

 man first beheld me exercising what I felt sure were 

 my lawful rights, from our own ground, on waters 

 sacred in his unbelieving and woolly mind to his 

 master and the marquis. I let him shout, and when 

 he had finished assured him with the arrogance of 

 youth and quite justifiable confidence, that he and his 

 master and his beastly net could go to the devil, and 

 that if Richard ii. had been unsportsmanlike enough 

 to perpetrate an annual poaching raid on our field and 

 garden among others it was an outrage of which his 



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