CLEAR WATERS 



train draws towards Codford the Wylie has shrunk, 

 it must be confessed, to extremely modest dimensions. 

 The obvious nature of my intentions seemed to rouse 

 the commercial gent, who had been apparently taking 

 stock of the little river from the corner seat, to satiric 

 utterance : ' We shouldn't,' said he, with rather a 

 truculent note and an accent that located him pre- 

 cisely, ' call that much of a river where I come from.' 

 ' There are some fine fishermen up there, I can tell 

 you,' he continued, * and the rivers are something 

 like.' He then spoke eloquently of the Wear and the 

 Tees, both of which I happened to know, and returned 

 again to quite uncalled-for strictures on the pleasant 

 little stream below us. By this display of untutored 

 complacency I was rather moved to take it out of him 

 a little, so asked him if he would be surprised to hear 

 that the average trout of the little stream he regarded 

 with such contempt would swallow the average fish 

 of the noble rivers he so extolled, without feeling 

 much inconvenience. Moreover, that we should 

 have to return here as unsizeable a trout that would 

 almost certainly be the largest of a good basket on the 

 Wear. Finally I ventured to point out that though 

 the Wylie was full of fish it was almost equally certain 

 that the doughtiest of the performers he had in mind 

 would, if dropped down here of a sudden, fail to catch 

 one of them. He quieted down a little on this. In 

 fact he received these crumbs of local information in 

 stony silence, only remarking that he was no fisherman 

 himself, but that he had many friends who were. In 

 such case he probably coupled me with them as a son of 

 Ananias, and profited nothing by my well-meant efforts 



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