56 By Stream and Sea. 



goes across the village-green, where his applause encouraged 

 many a sturdy cricketer on the summer evenings, up a 

 hollow lane between damp shaughs and copses, to the old 

 women in the cottages, and thence to the quiet rural church- 

 yard to perform a rite which, ere this year* was a month 

 old, his weeping friends under spreading fir branches of his 

 own selection performed for himself. 



Kingsley drew the line at fox-hunting, but he made 

 amends with his fly-rod. The chalk stream trout had as 

 much reason to fear him as did the black sheep of his 

 parochial fold. Few anglers can draw so much delight from 

 their recreation as did Kingsley. He was a trifle apt to be 

 dogmatic in his theories upon flies and fish, as anglers often 

 are, and as a man has a right to be who marries his 

 enthusiasm to general scientific knowledge. He was a 

 noted mountain fisherman, but better still he could succeed 

 in the clear, steady, lowland streams which tax the skill of 

 the best of us. Even in the saddle up among the fir- 

 needles he must needs give a passing thought to his 

 favourite pastime, of which he elsewhere said, " The angler 

 is brought close face to face with the flower and bird and 

 insect life of the rich river banks, the only part of the 

 landscape where the hand of man has never interfered, and 

 the only part in general which never feels the drought of 

 summer 'the trees planted by the waterside whose leaf 

 shall not wither.' " 



The habit, very common to him, of putting his foot 

 firmly down upon a thing in which he believed, comes out 

 conspicuous in " Chalk Stream Studies " a veritable ency- 

 clopaedia to the trout fisher. The Blackwater, a westerly 

 tributary of, and other smaller streams in, the Loddon 



* 1875- 



