ONCE SILVER STREAMS. 95 



have disappeared from their banks. Many of 

 the best-known rivers and streams have been 

 depopulated of their pink-spotted denizens, and 

 have become such that no pure thing can live 

 in them. Were there any shingly beaches, or 

 any pebble beds, spawn would never hatch upon 

 them ; or were this possible, nothing hatched 

 could long survive. 



Even now, pollution has done its worst. 

 Within the past dozen years, many salmon and 

 trout rivers have been depopulated to an alarm- 

 ing extent, and the causes that have contributed 

 to this end are on the increase. The late Richard 

 Jefferies, in one of his charming essays, says : 

 "It is the birds and other creatures peculiar to 

 the water that render fly-fishing so pleasant ; 

 were they all destroyed, and nothing left but 

 the mere fish, one might as well stand and angle 

 in a stone cattle -trough." But then the fish 

 are gone, too. And this being so, it may be 

 well to take one river as the type of many, and 

 see what phases of life have gone from it. Once 

 it was a famous trout - stream, and men who 

 wrote books on angling the kings of their craft 

 came to kill trout in its waters. But now 

 there are none to kill. A dozen mills pour their 

 dye-washes and waste into the stream, covering 

 its pebbly bottom with a filthy sediment, so 



