THE WELSH BORDERLAND 



Britain, while the landscape took on the colouring of 

 Pennsylvania or Virginia in a dry season. It had done 

 so, to be sure, in the five months' drought of 1893, 

 now forgotten except by elderly farmers and anglers, 

 but then without the great heat. It was not only, as 

 it so turned out, that July fishing would have been 

 absurd ; that often happens, but the very idea had a 

 sense of repulsion about it that I never felt before in 

 England and never expect to feel again. One heard, 

 and heard truly, that trout and salmon were dying in 

 some rivers. 191 3 in Wales and the Marches was bad 

 enough, but what water there was left at least re- 

 mained cool. The shrunken streams of 191 1 looked 

 positively oily, and had not been washed out for months. 

 I felt I could not have brought myself to eat a fish 

 out of the briskest of them as the parching summer 

 dragged on its semi-tropical, un-English course into 

 the autumn. My last day in the neighbourhood, the 

 second of August, had come, and not a line had I even 

 dreamed of wetting. But I was so anxious to have 

 a look at this portion of the Teme that I overcame my 

 distaste and determined to exercise my long-hoarded 

 privilege. Trout were the ostensible object of pur- 

 suit, for the grayling were not yet quite ready. 



It proved, of course, rather a pitiful business : the 

 jaded, cracking meadow-banks, the tired foliage, the 

 stuffy air, the thin, warm streams, the weary, lifeless 

 pools, the insufferable flies that made any rest for 

 the weary angler impossible even with a pipe. At the 

 end of a longish day of hard fishing, for the simple 

 reason that repose was impossible, I had as the result 

 a brace of half-pound trout, and considered that I was 



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