A DAY ON CHALKLEY'S 217 



and there was a good deal of splashing. It ought to 

 have been amusing to watch a bevy of small girls 

 competing in weight-putting, the objective being the 

 water, and the weights stones larger than any that 

 one would have thought small girls could lift in these 

 degenerate days. But amusement was tempered with 

 sorrow, for were not those mighty stones descending 

 upon the heads of certain trout marked down in the 

 morning ? It is a bold man who remonstrates with 

 small girls, and a bolder who dries his fly in dangerous 

 proximity to the charming faces of their elder sisters, 

 who with attendant swains formed more than a nucleus 

 of the procession. Flight, therefore, was plainly the 

 wisest course, though one or two local rods, by this 

 time arrived, seemed to regard their surroundings with 

 philosophy and to fish on unmoved. On the other side 

 of the meadow lies Old Barge, and here the angler may 

 be undisturbed, for between the two streams the water- 

 meadow is very watery indeed, and the public would 

 get wet if it walked there. The angler does get wet, 

 for the ditches are innumerable, and hard to avoid in 

 the long grass. 



Old Barge is not easy to fish. The trout seem to 

 make a point of feeding just on the other side of a 

 small clump of rushes or bed of weeds. It is impossible 

 to reach them from below, and almost impossible to 

 cover them without a drag from a point opposite. 

 One such fish, however, was at last covered, after a 

 fashion, by means of a very slack line, and he took the 

 soft black hackle like a lamb, fought gamely for his 

 size, and was netted at a precarious and swampy corner. 

 He was respectably over the limit of three-quarters of 



