JUNE 163 



with added fleche of the Flamboyant age ; there an 

 immemorial mill, squat, moss-grown, and so crazy 

 that it is a marvel its perpetual ' clack-clack ' does 

 not shake it to pieces; again a gentleman's maison 

 de campagne, white-shuttered, shaggy-lawned, with a 

 glorious Paulonia strewing its purple blossoms on 

 the red gravel drive, and filling all the grove with 

 fragrance. 



Set children at liberty in any place, and if there is 

 pond or running brook at hand, it is by the side thereof 

 that you will find them when you want them. So the 

 cyclist not the scorcher or the record-breaker, mark 

 you, but the leisurely loiterer whom these contemn will 

 inevitably dismount on every bridge he crosses, to peer 

 into the current. If the said cyclist is, in his worthier 

 aspect, also a trout-fisher, I defy him to come to such 

 a stream as the Cisson without emotion. A lucid, 

 brimming current, of the volume of the Itchen at 

 Chilland, tarrying here in placid reaches among the 

 bending flowers, hurrying there noiselessly with long 

 tresses of water-crowfoot waving in its liberal bosom ; 

 no tumult, no violence, nor any stagnation, exactly the 

 varying, moderate speed of which the dry-fisher knows 

 so well how to make use. A rise ! yonder, beside that 

 bunch of yellow rattle just the little dimple that a 

 good trout makes in sipping at a floating fly. O ! for 

 my trusty splitcane, far away in over-fished England. 

 There ! he rises again, and another higher up. What 

 fly are they taking ? 



At that moment a mayfly a veritable green drake, 



