CLEAR WATERS 



in his clothes. To others again, unaccustomed to light 

 crafts, a coracle appears on the very face of it a truly 

 perilous mode of conveyance. I discovered inciden- 

 tally that an acquaintance v^^ho lived in Hertfordshire 

 had once found himself fishing upon the Dee and had 

 been induced to make the full voyage with Evan 

 Evans, apparently on a high w^ater. I asked him what 

 sport he had had. * Sport ! ' said he, ' I had quite 

 enough to do hanging on for my life without fishing, 

 and was only too thankful to get safely down.' But 

 then he was six feet two. Moreover it was before 

 Evan had become a total abstainer, and under the in- 

 fluence of cwrw he may have ridden his coracle over 

 a line of country that two glasses of port would not 

 rise to. 



He was an interesting companion too was Evan in 

 the slack moments of lunch on the bank or in blank 

 hours. There was nothing of the long-skulled, swarthy, 

 dreamy-looking Iberian aboriginal about him. Beyond 

 a doubt he was of Goidelic stock, with a face like a 

 harvest moon set in a halo of ginger whisker. He was 

 in short what is known as a * Red Welshman.' He 

 read the river as an open book, but he was neither a 

 poet nor, I am afraid, a saint. The rest of his in- 

 tellectual outfit mainly consisted of a stock of iron- 

 clad prejudices quite removed from those usually 

 associated with his nation. He hated a preacher, for 

 instance, as heartily as any Frenchman hates his wife's 

 priest. He hated March browns tied without red legs. 

 Above all he hated the wading fraternity, which 

 automatically included myself on all days but the 

 annual one, when he pretended to ignore my other 



58 



