THE ANGLER'S SOUVENIR. 



229 



is, perhaps, the one study he has neglected. 

 Doubtless the dryness of the technical part of the 

 pursuit the long names and the minute subdivi- 

 sions have something to do with it, but we think 

 the vastness of the study has more. What is the 

 use, one asks, of beginning when it is impossible 

 ever to get near the end ] There is a great deal in 

 this, and we must confess that our own study of 

 plants has been more with a view to understand- 

 ing their artistic effect, as component parts of the 

 landscape, than from a love of the abstruse and 

 scientific part of the business. In that spirit, there- 

 fore, the following paper is written ; and as our 

 book is chiefly intended for waterside wanderers, 

 we shall confine ourselves to pointing out the more 

 striking of the shrubs and flowers which meet the 

 eye of the angler by lake or stream ; and surely 

 the angler, of all men, should know what there is 

 to interest him when sport fails, and fish are not. 



There are few streams whose waters do not 

 reflect the graceful wands of the willow. By 

 ornamental waters, the weeping willows droop their 

 pensile branches ; by sluggish, tortuous streams, 

 the white willows, crowned with a pollard-top, or ( 

 grown into a more natural but somewhat ungainly 

 tree, diversify the level landscape, and mark the 

 course of the hidden river ; in hedgerows, the 

 palms, whose yellow clusters herald the grey foli- 

 age ; and in marshy spots, the common osiers grow 

 in fringed companies. The willow, in these its 



