JANUARY 7 



II 



These dark winter days and long evenings are 

 famous for looking up old friends in for- wim^ 

 gotten shelves. The bibliography of field Scrope 

 sports would, in itself, fill many volumes, and perhaps 

 no department of modern literature, except fiction, 

 ' pans out ' so poorly. Much of it consists of business- 

 like instruction how to kill, or a ledger-like chronicle 

 of what has been killed ; here and there a good soul is 

 moved to the endeavour to impart to the public some 

 of the emotions which affected him in the presence of 

 wild nature, resulting either in unfluent rhapsody which 

 stirs nobody, or in liberal extracts from the poets 

 which everybody either knows already or skips. But 

 there are exceptions. Here and there in the inter- 

 minable catalogue are books which it is a privilege to 

 know ; books that it is refreshment to drop into ; books 

 that speak of a world which seems far fresher than our 

 own, more leisurely, less methodical. Nowadays, for 

 instance, when a man goes a-fishing, he falls into a 

 fidget unless his fly is perpetually on the water. 

 Perhaps there is some record to beat, which can only 

 be done (and records exist but to be beaten) by feverish 

 attention to business; or the water is in prime order 

 a condition which, in modern salmon rivers, seems 

 far more fleeting than of yore ; not a moment must be 

 lost ; Viator, Venator, Poietes, Physicus all the simple 

 interrogators that used to tempt Piscator into delightful 

 irrelevancy have been hustled off the scene ; we have 



