THE ENGLISH LAKE COUNTRY 



of bird song from the woods, the distant roar of Aira 

 force that 



With torrent hoarse 

 Breaks from its woody glen. 



Alas ! what would Wordsworth say to the dreadful 

 discords that with strident uproar shatter these gentle 

 harmonies of spring, and make the mountains groan 

 in prolonged agony ? But enough of this. ' We have 

 come to stay? l We have come to stay? bellows the 

 defiant scorcher, a sort of triumphant paean, as if it 

 were a positive merit to make a race-track of the 

 shores of Ullswater and a pandemonium of its en- 

 circling mountains. But what the deuce do Words- 

 worth or the eloquent peace of Ullswater matter ? 

 Mighty little to any one, I should think, at twenty- 

 five miles an hour. And all this could have been 

 so easily averted from this tiny and precious fragment 

 of England. 



In later June it is perhaps as pleasant and more 

 profitable to paddle in and out along the eastern shore 

 and throw your fly within a yard or two of the steep 

 face of the crags, where they drop sharply into deep 

 water, or behind submerged rocks that here and there 

 lie about their feet ; for the grubs will probably be 

 then falling from the stunted oak or rowan trees 

 overhead that find a hard living in the clefts of the 

 rock. Discarding the three flies of May the Broughton 

 point, Greenwell, and black hackle with silver twist 

 and with a red spinner, or a small woodcock and 

 orange, for a drop, and some hackle-fly, palmer, or 

 grouse for a leader, I have sometimes fished the latter 

 by letting it strike the cliff gently near the water-line, 



2 55 



