APRIL 63 



pleasure the thought of those toilers who may never 

 share it, save, at most, as lookers-on. 'What no one 

 with us shares seems half our own ' ; at the same time, 

 if one were to decline all amusement from which the 

 multitude is debarred, that multitude would be no whit 

 the better off. Which reflection leads one dangerously 

 near a treatise on the futility of free fishing and free 

 strawberry beds ; which would be a serious matter for 

 your readers. 



Linloskin the frog pool for that is the meaning 

 of the Gaelic name, with what fitness can it ever have 

 been applied to this powerful torrent, rushing through 

 a wild confusion of trap rock and boulders into the 

 comparative repose of a wide, wind-swept basin, before 

 it is precipitated with renewed tumult into the wooded 

 gorge below ? Anything at first sight less suggestive 

 of frogs one could scarcely imagine. It is full three 

 hundred years nearer four hundred since Gaelic was 

 spoken in this district, though Gaelic names stick fast 

 to places therein, owing to the notorious difficulty of 

 inventing new ones. Nor could the Gael, albeit of 

 subtler imagination than the Saxon, devise unmeaning 

 titles for localities. Place-names in all languages grow 

 spontaneously out of some incident or natural feature 

 marking the spot, and this Linloskin this pool of frogs 

 is no exception ; for, on its western side, there is a 

 backwater, fair with white lilies in high summer, but 

 dark and muddy-bottomed now, alive with spawning 

 frogs. It may be of no practical importance to know 

 that when Aymer de Valence, exactly six hundred 

 years ago, to wit, in April 1307, sent Sir Robert de 



