CLEAR WATERS 



so far as fishing went ; but that is not the point. 

 If this stream were thrown open for three years it 

 might possibly improve. It would, at any rate, enter- 

 tain the public, and there is nothing on its shores, 

 being quite wild, that the humble angler, even if 

 so disposed, could conceivably damage. But such a 

 suggestion, I am quite sure, would be received with 

 horror and indignation. 



To return, however, to the North Tyne. There is 

 another fifteen miles of the river above Bellingham, 

 before it shrinks to a wee burn amid the wilds of 

 Kielder, the Duke of Northumberland's shooting- 

 box on the Scottish border. The little railway ascends 

 the valley, as I have said, and a tolerable road follows 

 the river, constantly reinforced by moorland burns, to 

 its source. How much ticket water there is about 

 Falstone, where there is also an inn, I do not know, but 

 I think some miles, and it looks very attractive. This 

 is in truth a great country. Once mounted up on the 

 ledge of moorland that on its south-western side over- 

 looks the dale, all beyond is solitude of a most im- 

 pressive kind a great waste of heath, peat-moss, and 

 sheep pasture, a low, rolling prairie plateau rather than 

 hills, with the high bluffs that carry the Roman wall 

 along their craggy summits, upon the hither side of the 

 South Tyne, dimly cutting the sky-line. In all this 

 wide angle between the two forks of Tyne, a dozen 

 to twenty miles across, with its base resting on the 

 lofty hills of the Scottish border, there is practically 

 nothing but a shepherd's cottage standing forlorn here 

 and there, and along its edges the occasional home- 

 stead of some great sheep farmer. Grouse, plovers, 

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