444 Notes on Sport and T^'avel vi 



Then, O my friend, reflect on the beginning and 

 ending of your stream ! Ponder over its insignificant 

 commencement in a bed of splashy rushes, from 

 which it oozes out in such a tiny grass-concealed 

 rivulet that you are not aware of its existence till 

 you put your horse's foreleg into it up to the shoulder, 

 as you are cantering quietly after the United Agricul- 

 turists' harriers, along what seems a ' clere ' of 

 smoothest and soundest chalk turf, and go hurling 

 headlong, horse and man, to the just-too-late chorus 

 of ' Ware green spring ! ' Turn, then, with grief and 

 shame to its end or endings, — flattened out into a 

 sham pool, impiously called a lake, three feet deep, 

 so weed-and-slime-begrown that you cannot even 

 skate on it without prostrating yourself ignominiously 

 before the object of your affections, while performing 

 your pet figure ; teeming with jack and perch ; nay, 

 even demoralised enough to harbour within its bosom 

 that sour, scaly, puritanical abomination, the chub ; 

 and then trickling feebly over an artificial tumbling 

 bay, to be absorbed into some crawling, muddy river 

 that would choke a sturgeon, or to bear coal-barges 

 and beery bargees, as part of the Bargetown and 

 Muddyford Canal. 



How different is her life from beginning to end ! 

 Rushing full-grown out of that wild loch that lay 

 far down below us as we crouch flat, flat on the 

 heather, waiting for the deer to rouse, about three 

 o'clock this bright September afternoon ; stretching 

 in a bright blue curve between the hills, like the cast- 



