THE TROUT STREAM 17 



"trouts and very large silver eels " ? Passing over 

 Chelsea Bridge but now, and looking for the 

 thousandth time with interest on London's perhaps 

 most picturesque bit of scenery, on the grand old 

 church, and the irregular beauties of Cheyne Walk, 

 and the noble curve in the dark flowing stream that 

 bears crowded steamboat, and blackened barge 

 that almost matches the colour of its own water, 1 

 tried to imagine what an evening scene there must 

 have been like in the time of old Best, and I entirely 

 failed. " When you go to angle at Chelsea," he 

 writes, " on a calm fair day, the wind being in the 

 right corner, pitch your boat almost opposite to the 

 church, and angle in the six or seven feet water, 

 where, as well as at Battersea Bridge, you will meet 

 with plenty of roach and dace." Those were days 

 when the fifth arch of Westminster Bridge marked 

 an excellent place for the angler to fix his boat at, 

 and when Twickenham was distinctly good for a 

 trout. The Ravensbourne might have been in- 

 cluded among the south country trout streams at a 

 considerably later date : I fear I cannot include it 

 in my list of Kent rivers to-day. 



But though a few streams have dropped out of 

 the list of our south country trouting waters, whilst 

 others are sorely beset, happily these are but in a 

 very small minority. The lost rivers of London 

 are not perhaps — from, at any rate, the trout fisher- 

 man's point of view — of great import. Of far 

 more gravity are the two questions of pollution 

 and want of water, which have of late years 

 threatened, if not actually destroyed, many an 

 excellent fishery. Several test cases in regard to 

 the evil of pollution have been tried within tho 

 last ten years in regard to South of England 



C 



