16 



at your approach, rapidly hide themselves beneath the 

 flowers and leaves of the water-lily ; and, as the season 

 advances, to find all these objects changed for others of 

 the same kind, but better and brighter, till the swallow 

 and the trout contend, as it were, for the gaudy May-fly, 

 and till, in pursuing your amusement in the calm and 

 balmy evening, you are serenaded by the songs of the 

 cheerful thrush and melodious nightingale, performing the 

 offices of paternal love, in thickets ornamented with the 

 rose and wood-bine !" Salmonia, page 10. 



An anonymous writer, in that excellent Sunday news- 

 paper, THE ATLAS very properly named after the fabled 

 giant, for the weight of information it carries remarks 

 in the clear chanticleer spirit of a lover of our art ; 

 " Without the most remote intention of upbraiding any 

 with a fastidiousness or deficiency of taste ; without wish- 

 ing to make any body discontented with pre-conceived 

 and long-settled notions of the external, visible, and 

 practical delights of this busy and various earth ; or with- 

 out affecting any undue advantages of choice on our part, 

 we do not hesitate to say, that trout-fishing with the fly is 

 the perfection of sublunary pleasure to those who are, 

 in the full sense, ' brothers of the angle.' 



'Let the huntsman praise his hounds, 

 Let the farmer praise his grounds, 

 And the squire his sweet-scented lawn ;' 



but a mountain stream, running through an inclined val- 

 ley, shaded by expanding trees, with a cool wind breathing 

 up against the current, and clouds not rainy but dark 

 sailing over-head, is a more attractive sight to the lover of 

 angling, than the best pack in all the country side, the 

 rich golden-eared harvest, and the shorn lap of velvet 

 before the manor-house, with all its promise of comfort 

 and hints of ease. 



"Select one of those days in June in our modern turn- 

 coat June, that (abandoning the path of its ancestors, 

 which was one bright blaze of sunshine throughout) is now 

 a capricious and lover-like month, sometimes smiling and 

 sometimes frowning, and anon weeping, and always co- 

 quetting select one of those days in June which your 

 in-door people would call * dubious ;' let there be a smart 



