CLEAR WATERS 



without speaking, and as I thought with a touch of 

 compassion in his eye. He evidently thought we were 

 natural fools to be fly-fishing for trout at such a time. 

 But in truth as it turned out if there was any sym- 

 pathy going around to spare he was the most fitting 

 recipient of it. He was a tall, ginger-whiskered man, 

 with a salmon-rod of the dimensions of a telegraph 

 post, and remained silent merely because no true 

 Northumbrian ever makes the first overture if he has 

 to wait all day. When I broke the ice he admitted 

 to having done nothing, though a little consoled by 

 the report of a fish having been killed two days previ- 

 ously at Haydon bridge, which did not suggest a high 

 standard for the South Tyne. Before we had done 

 with him, however, he had unfolded, perhaps not too 

 willingly, a tale beside which our few hours of pleasant 

 futility were as nothing ; for he had fished the river 

 steadily, so far as we could make out, for years, and to 

 his everlasting credit admitted that he had never yet 

 killed a salmon in it. Now a man who will volun- 

 tarily make that admission with no earthly reason for 

 so doing, and every temptation to tell tall stories, is 

 much more precious than a successful salmon-fisher. 

 Later on we watched him work down a fine pool below 

 us and drive his line out with all reasonable skill from 

 the telegraph post, and were forced to conclude that 

 either he was one of the unlucky ones of the earth or 

 that very few salmon patronised the South Tyne. 

 We hoped, too, he was a poet at least and saw things 

 in the moving waters and the bordering woods, and 

 so was happy. 

 But the North Tyne is a very different river, and 

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