EARLY DAYS 13 



Boyhood has no prescience. What would I not 

 give now for a morning's verse-making with the dear 

 old gentleman, or even — which used to be perhaps, 

 and would now be certainly, more terrifying — an 

 hour or two of wrestling with the obscure and tedious 

 narrative of Thucydides ! 



But in the afternoon, the tasks all done, I would 

 certainly make my way to that strange streamlet 

 and endeavour to prove that the years which have 

 robbed me of almost every particle of Greek have 

 done something to improve my fishing. I think 

 I know how to catch those trout now. It is a slow 

 business, but it can be done. The angler has to 

 grow into the landscape like a post or a willow tree. 

 After a time the fish get accustomed to him and 

 return to their places. Then he delivers his orange 

 partridge or his blue upright with an underhand 

 cast, and lo, the legend of their being uncatchable 

 is disproved. 



It is easy, you may say, to theorise when one is 

 safe removed from an emergency by many years 

 and much country. And so it is. But it is not all 

 theory. I have proved this waiting game often 

 enough, and in all kinds of water. The shallows 

 of a tiny brook, the sluggish reach with quaking 

 banks, the dead unruftled flat — such places are often 

 a scene of tumult on an angler's approach, and long 

 ere he can extend enough line to cover them. His 



