THE TROUT STREAM 41 



fishing for moorland troutlets under these conditions 

 to stalking the three-pounders by the banks of the 

 Hampshire chalk streams on a soft June morning ! 

 different, but still delightful to the keen {\y fisher- 

 man and the lover of nature in her sterner and 

 more desolate aspects. On many an April day 

 on the upper Barle or Exe or on the romantic 

 Bagworthy water, I have fished from early morn- 

 ing to nightfall, till it has become so dark that 

 I have no longer been able to see my cast of two 

 or three flics on even the stiller and smoother 

 stretches of the stream, and have at length turned 

 homeward without by any means feeling that the 

 day has been an overlong one. The moorland air 

 is wonderfully bracing at about the season when 

 the angling is often at its very best ; a finer nerve 

 and brain tonic for a hard-worked man, provided 

 he be robust enough to stand the bitter wind and 

 the rough walking, it would be hard to find. 



Up here in the wilds, even when the summer has 

 come, there is little of the lavish bird, insect, and 

 plant life which characterise the trout streams of 

 the home counties. Nature has dealt out a com- 

 paratively " stinted stepmother dole of gifts " to the 

 land of the rock and granite streams. High up 

 and near the sources of these trout streams the 

 dipper is one of the few birds that frequent bank 

 and boulder, and the heather often the predomin- 

 ating, indeed almost the solitary, flower for miles 

 and miles. You may occasionally flush a black- 

 cock, and the partridge's cry where a little cultiva- 

 tion has been persevered w^ith may tend to slightly 

 soften the scene. But sternness and scantiness of 

 life are as decidedly the features of the scenery of 

 these moorland trout streams as softness and pro- 



