MARCH GREY-FACE 7 



chance fouled the scent, and thereafter, laying a 

 double, left them baffled. 



Leaving our fellow-fishers at the pool, we return 

 to the upper river, determined to catch the big pike 

 that lives there. The grey scene becomes our exclu- 

 sive possession. The wind of the snow-storm has 

 passed, and the tall alders bend their knotted tangle 

 of twigs to a calm, amber-grey river. Beyond, on 

 higher ground, wych-elms draw their delicate hatching 

 across the mellow red-brick front of an Elizabethan 

 mansion. A herd of fallow deer, many of them white, 

 stand in the park near the evergreen of a large holm- 

 oak, and some hollies whose berries just declare 

 themselves in the grey light of our afternoon. Com- 

 ing quietly and alone to the pool where the pike lies, 

 we only faintly startle a pair of hares gambolling on 

 the bank. They go off with a peculiar trot that 

 makes us think for a moment they are small grey 

 foxes. Then they sit and look back at us, and 

 having thus assured us that we are their very good 

 friends at such a distance resume their discussion. 



Not till we have swung the bait with a splash 

 nearly to the far side of the river do two hen pheasants 

 rise from the shorn sedges and fly away. We had 

 been visible to them for some minutes, but though 

 their cover was of the slightest, they might have been 

 invisible to us if they had remained for an hour. A 

 duck, too, that had been feeding in the marsh, goes off 

 with whirling wings, and while we were far off a pair 

 of herons sailed lumbering away. Must everything 

 on land and in water flee at our approach ? They 

 will come back if we are quiet enough, the little things 

 first, and then one by one the large things, till perhaps 



