THE MILL AND THE FISH 151 



old inn grows bigger, and humps of slime appear where 

 once the stream was clear. The eggs of the Mayfly, laid 

 on the surface, sink to an uncongenial bed, and no longer 

 do the grey-green flies entangle themselves in the goose 

 berry bushes of the fifteenth-century garden. Whatever 

 may be foul in the stream is caught for a while on the 

 slime banks, and breeds unwholesome gases. So the 

 speckled trout, which are as vitally in need of pure water 

 as lichens of pure air, are as rare below the mill as lichens 

 in London. And they give it a wide berth. There are 

 no trout, or very, very few, within a good mile of the 

 mill. They turn back in their upward journey at the 

 ** hairpin bends &quot; among the deep sedges (where the 

 mallard and one pair of snipe have bred). Below these 

 the upper changes seem to be forgotten or are purged, 

 and life below the stream, as well as on it and above it, 

 is as of old. 



The Mayfly rise. The cases, that look like corpses but 

 are cenotaphs, float downstream, to the wonder of small 

 boys paddling in the lower ford. The trout, whose tastes 

 vary from hour to hour, swallow the fly sometimes while 

 they are still water-beasts and have not yet reached the 

 surface where air and water meet, sometimes as they ride 

 on the surface, light as a dried leaf or fallen feather, 

 waiting for the moment of delight. The stream is yeasty 

 with life. Things that have crawled in the mud, that 

 have lain dead as sticks, that have wriggled like worms 

 near the surface, have leapt winged into the air, as though 

 we had seen in the twinkling of an eye the secular evolu 

 tion of the bird from the fish in the Gospel according to 

 Charles Darwin. But the fisherman is wondering 

 whether he will try a Cock-y Bondhu, a March brown or 

 a yellow dun. Then the Mayfly, as if they had a common 

 signal like a flock of finches, begin to rise in numbers, 



