CLEAR WATERS 



by explaining that he was in another world from 

 Hertfordshire, and must brush all these fallacies from 

 his mind if he wished to be a happy angler and enjoy 

 the four years of Plymouth, to which he told me he was 

 destined. I felt I might venture, when we had smoked 

 a pipe together, to offer him an illustration of how all 

 of us, good, bad, and indifferent, fished a woody, west 

 country stream. He came along with me on the bank 

 above for half an hour, and though the spectacle could 

 not have been of much practical service to him he 

 was quite grateful, and declared that his eyes were 

 opened to a condition of things he had never dreamed 

 of and that he would re-commence his angling career, 

 which I do not think had been a very full one, 

 from another standpoint. I dare say before he was 

 ordered off to Chatham or Portsmouth he became 

 quite an adept, for he was very keen. 



I don't know whether the Avon is more beautiful 

 in April or in June. Its lush verdure in the latter 

 month is delightful, and I like better to fish it then 

 for reasons more than sufficiently stated. But in the 

 spring, in the woods of Devon, above all along the 

 margin of the streams, what a spangled carpet nature 

 spreads upon the cool mossy ground, before the 

 foliage of the trees and saplings has yet been shaken 

 out and the eye become accustomed to the warmth 

 and colouring of summer verdure. What a blaze is 

 here of primrose, violet, and celandine, of campion, 

 anemone, and marigold beneath the still bare branches 

 of the oak and ash which play so prominent a part in 

 Devonian woods. One misses, to be sure, the opulent 

 sycamore, that precocious harbinger of summer, by 

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