176 AUGUST ON THE ITCHEN. 



draggling home are more children, two little 

 girls of eight and nine, each in charge of a 

 diminutive brother, who has taken to their 

 boots, carrying the pickle bottle known so well 

 to minnows by a string round its neck. You 

 watch them cross the slimy plank bridge; the 

 river on one side ; a ditch quite deep enough 

 to drown all four on the other, if they chanced 

 to trip on it. 



Beyond that is the now deserted bank ; the 

 sun low in the heavens on the left, the terraced 

 garden with its discordant peacocks on the right. 

 Sedge flies are crawling about the rushes and 

 fluttering between them. The surface of the 

 stream is unbroken by any trout rise, though 

 in certain shallows small grayling pop up at 

 intervals. You are too abstracted, too 

 magnanimous, or too magnificent to cast for 

 them. Your plan is to move up to the 

 peninsula under whose heavy fringe of rushes 

 there were two trout this time last year whose 

 places you know to a foot. Their time is not 

 due for an hour or more, so you pass up, after 

 depositing some of your kit on the rail of the 

 plank bridge where you so well remember a 

 sovereign dropping out of your pocket into the 

 ditch as you stooped to pick a dock leaf. 



The keeper comes down the meadow with his 

 handsome setter, and sees you looking at the 

 place. No, he never found it : although he 

 had a try one winter's day. Perhaps one of 

 the ditchers will years hence. There was no 

 other rod out. The Captain he had ketched 



