70 LINES IN PLEASANT PLACES 



and that is just the association one familiar with its 

 meads and wooded banks would bear with him in a 

 cherished corner of memory. For the ordinary angler 

 perhaps the river is a trifle too much with " alders 

 crown'd." On the contrary, to the person who can 

 command the use of a boat, and drop down upon the 

 lazy current with a long line ahead of him, those dense 

 defences of the bank become conservators of sport. 

 They are better than a keeper, for they are always 

 there, and cannot by any bribe be seduced from their 

 duty. And more than any other tree the alder is the 

 familiar companion of the angler. Upon some rivers 

 the willow would contest the position, perhaps, but 

 Fate demands that it should run to pollard, and so 

 get too high up in the world to be a close companion to 

 man. 



We always make friends with the somewhat prosaic 

 and even sombre alder, and, in return, it always has 

 something to show us. All through the autumn and 

 winter it makes as goodly a display as it can with its 

 long barren catkins ; in the spring it is thick with the 

 queer black little husks ; and in the summer and 

 autumn its defects of shape in the matter of branches 

 are hidden by close, dark, glossy leaves, which sturdily 

 hold on when others have been snatched and scattered. 

 And does not an old poet ascribe to our alder the quality 

 of protector to other growths ? 



The alder, whose fat shadow nourisheth 

 Each plant set Deere to him long flourishcth. 



But it is interesting to remember that a still older 

 poet had his eye on the alder, and it is a pretty conceit 

 in which Virgil fixes upon its wood as the origin of ship- 

 building. The timber is so easily worked and so handy 

 that it might well have been actually used by primitive 



