THE MICROBE 



pected to consider it favourably. There are always 

 two or three sockdolagers of twice that weight 

 occupying the choice positions just under the fall, 

 whence they regard one at quite close range with 

 contemptuous eye. A pleasant leafy spot it is, too, on 

 a June evening, when from the Norman church tower 

 the curfew-bell is tolling ; so near and yet so aloof 

 from the dear old town, whose muffled hum floats over 

 the mellow riverside gardens and mingles with the 

 roar of the dam, the rumble of the mill-wheel, and 

 the whispering leaves of the tall poplars overhead. 



But all this is anticipating, for we had not got much 

 farther chronologically than the first wriggle of the 

 microbe before the masterpiece in the gardener's 

 lodge. It was some three years before I felt it stir 

 again, and this fell about at Twyford, that most 

 venerable probably of all preparatory schools, which 

 stands, as every Wykhamist knows, in tolerable pro- 

 pinquity to the Itchen. This classic stream, however, 

 had been nothing to me nor to any of us except as 

 the scene of an occasional bathe. The contests of 

 the playground absorbed our outdoor life. But I 

 well remember one June half holiday near the end of 

 my time, how while engaged in a cricket-match I 

 espied one of the masters pass along the end of the 

 playground with a long whippy rod over his shoulder, 

 a creel on his back, and accompanied by a young friend 

 of my own. A voice from a fieldsman somewhere 

 called out, ' Hullo, there 's old Brown going mayfly- 

 fishing.' Then all at once I experienced the same 

 unaccountable attraction and queer, wistful longing 

 that the gardener's print, never thought of since, 



9 



