62 THE SUMMER 



there who, all through the spring and 

 early summer, have to be content to smell 

 the trout afar off, and take their holiday 

 when the schools have broken up and 

 the rivers have dwindled down to their 

 lowest level ? They are an enthusiastic 

 lot, these fishermen, who leave their 

 wives and children to the care of the 

 sands of the sea, and betake themselves 

 to that waterside club "where the 

 women cease from troubling and the 

 wicked are at rest": where, also, they 

 labour assiduously from morn till dusk, 

 whipping the crystal pools, in which 

 not so much as a fin shows itself, strug- 

 gling over boulder and briar, mountain 

 and moor, with a tremendous, but not 

 discreditable, expenditure of energy, 

 buoyed up by the eternal hope that the 

 next cast may induce a fish to rise. 



The sun scorches them from above, 

 the heat from the sun-baked rocks smites 

 them from below, there is a very plague 



