CLEAR WATERS 



it Is usually in what is known as good condition — when 

 the streams, that is to say, are heavy to beat up against 

 continually, and the fish rise briskly perhaps for a couple 

 of hours, and then go down for good, and the surface 

 of the water becomes, as they say in Scotland, dour. 

 Moreover, in spring the good fish, of which there are 

 or were a great many in the Avon, half to three-quarter- 

 pounders, have not come out into the shallows nor 

 taken seriously to surface food, as they do later. I 

 think the river in this particular is rather different 

 from most Devonian streams, though exactly like so 

 many of them in physical characteristics. 



Leaving the villages of Huish, Diptford, Woodleigh, 

 and Loddiswell to face the south-west storms on 

 windy heights above it, the Avon cultivates a strict 

 seclusion. For Devonian villages are not usually 

 dreams of thatch and wattle nestling around orchards 

 in a valley, as commonly depicted by the gushing 

 scribe since the county became a sort of literary fashion 

 with outsiders. They mainly affect bare hill-tops, 

 and are exceedingly prone to slate and whitewash, just 

 avoiding positive ugliness, to do them justice, but 

 making no claim whatever to the aesthetic qualities 

 with which modern convention in London and the 

 suburbs adorns them as if it were their positive speci- 

 ality. In such antiquities of all descriptions every 

 archaeologist knows the western county comes rather 

 low on the list. ' Oh, isn't this like Devonshire ? ' 

 babbled a lady and a novelist too, as we sped past 

 Chislehurst, of all places, the other day. I felt pain- 

 fully tempted to paraphrase old Bishop Philpott's dry 

 rejoinder to the gushing lady, who asked him if 

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