CLEAR WATERS 



your clothes on to your skin, it begins to awaken an 

 irresistible and unworthy yearning to turn tail to the 

 storm and make for home and a hot bath. Moreover, 

 what with the wind and the high waves, fine gut and 

 a stiffish rod, I had snicked off two or three flies in fish, 

 and only replaced them in the tumult with the utmost 

 difficulty. So when the cast at length gave way above 

 the top dropper, by some untoward combination of 

 an unseen turning fish and a tumbling foam-crested 

 billow, I could not muster suflScient resolution to lie on 

 my face under a wet bank and mount a fresh lot on a 

 thicker cast. I well remember the savage wildness of 

 that scene — the low clouds racing in ceaseless battalions 

 along the face of the high screes and crags, and the 

 seething surface of the long, gloomy lake below. But 

 finer than all, however, the waters were being driven 

 up into the narrow neck at the lake foot, and there 

 seemed to concentrate their rage, shooting high into 

 the air in solid sheets, to be flung in clouds of spray for 

 an astonishing distance downward into the ravine of 

 the out-leaping beck, which in a long series of cascades 

 descends sharply into the vale far below. I had eight 

 or ten fish wrested from the tempest at any rate for as 

 big a buffeting and complete a ducking as I ever 

 endured. 



On quieter days, however, it is a beautiful walk up 

 here from Patterdale, leaving the main road near the 

 foot of Brotherswater, and taking the turf track above 

 the beck from the romantic little hamlet of Low 

 Hartsop — a cluster of two or three picturesque, 

 cheerful homesteads overhung with ash and sycamore, 

 and three or four smaller ones long fallen to ruin : their 

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