CLEAR WATERS 



IX 



IN AND AROUND NORTHUMBERLAND 



THE regrettable fact that I have never wetted 

 a Hne in Derbyshire or Yorkshire might well 

 seem a rather serious qualification of my 

 claim to have wandered rather widely by English and 

 Welsh waters. But to me, at any rate, there is some 

 substantial compensation, in the memory of a genial 

 month spent in the west Yorkshire dales. As this 

 was the merry month of May, it was with painfully 

 mixed feelings that I found myself, though not dis- 

 quaUfied from any other form of activity, temporarily 

 incapacitated from wielding a rod. It seems rather 

 at odds with the flavour of these pages to frankly 

 state that in the retrospect I am extremely glad it thus 

 fell out. I was not altogether of that opinion at the 

 time, though old enough and wise enough, I trust, 

 to recognise that there was a good deal of virtue in the 

 necessity. Moreover, I was engaged in the congenial 

 task of assisting Mr. Sutton Palmer, the best delineator 

 of mountain streams known to me, in celebrating these 

 glories of the Yorkshire dales upon the printed page. 

 I would not give a fig for the opinion of the Royal 

 Academy on the interpretation of a mountain river. 

 What do the vast majority of landscape painters know 

 290 



