liiin us a terrier woiild shake a rat. Larry, between liis 

 cutHiigs and shakings, managed to protest that lie did not 

 know the way, and my friend, pausing for breath, and 

 iolding- him at arm's lengtli, said, " What sliall I (hj with 

 the scoundrel)'" "Give him one for me," I replied, and 

 he got such another shaking up as he is not likely to forget, 

 and then he was flung upon the straw bellowing like a mad 

 bull, and invoking all the holy saints to come and save him. 

 We got the horse in the car and drove home, leaving: Larry 

 to get back as best he might, and it was in the small hours 

 <if the morning that I eventually crawled into bed. Larry 

 turned up next day at my ]dace, smiling, and waylayinj^ 

 me on my way to the river, asked in the most unconcerned 

 manner, *' Did your honor and the master catch any fish 

 yesterday J'" 



There had been heavy rain for another week ; the river 

 was again as thick as Dublin stout, and nothing less than 

 three or four days of fine weather would give us a chance of 

 n salmon. I had fired away all our cartridges in the snipe 

 bog;, and was reduced to a state of enforced idleness that 

 ivas most trying-. What could be more depressing' than to 

 find oneself without a chum under these conditions, in a 

 lonely farmhouse, far from the haunts of man, and without 

 books ? And the rain, when it really means business, rolls 

 along^ like fleecy clouds, blotting out the landscape day after 

 day until the trees and the rocks and everything else appear 

 to exude water, and there is no such thing as solid land — 

 the whole of the island is in a state of solution ! Well, this 

 was the state of affairs on this occasion, and my worthy host 

 liad tried to cheer me up by affording information as to any 

 mountain-fed rivers, within reach, that were likely to clear 

 ra])idl3', when the rain ceased. But of all the unreliable 

 guides to be met with in this world, commend me to the 

 Irish peasant ! Host Flyn had lived, man and boy, some 

 ,sixty years, in that same farmhouse — and no keener fisher- 

 man ever cast a fly — but he knew absolutely nothing of his 

 surroundings beyond a range of some half-dozen miles. He 

 had "heard tell," however, of a good many of the angling 



