6 By Stream and Sea. 



Church in these days of grace is, however, most carefully 

 tended ; its churchyard is a finely shaded God's-acre, and 

 over the walls of the building luxuriant ivy is climbing 

 upwards and onwards. 



Rickmansworth possesses good inn accommodation of the 

 comfortable, old-fashioned kind ; but there is an unpretend- 

 ing little tavern down by the bridge specially dear to a 

 fraternity of anglers who make it their head-quarters. Their 

 room overlooks a back stream running swiftly from a weir 

 at the bottom of the cabbage garden, and day and night, 

 winter and summer, feast days and fast days, they are 

 soothed by the musical plash of the water rippling along 

 under the balcony which compasses the entire front of this 

 homely Fisherman's Home. Fishing-gear fills the corners, 

 mantelpiece, and sideboard. Upon the wall of the Wal- 

 tonian sanctum there hangs a floridly coloured representa- 

 tion of the catching of a salmon. The angler is seen 

 Struggling with a rod that by all rules of perspective should 

 be four hundred and fifty feet long ; and he is of the type of 

 sportsmen so dear to a certain class of artists — a swarthy 

 gentleman of the gipsy type, cigar in mouth, and hair most 

 ravishingly curled. But somehow the picture tells its story 

 admirably : it gives you an accurate idea of a fine salmon 

 river, and the country through which it runs and the sort of 

 tableau that an angler winching in an exhausted salmon, an 

 attendant with gaff outstretched, and an odd slain fish or so 

 neatly deposited among flowers and grass under a rock, 

 would make. 



Some such pictorial furniture as this is as necessary to an 

 angler's inn as the Herring prints are to the coaching and 

 marketing tavern. We have not, alas ! many honest 

 angling inns left to us — I mean the inn as to which it was no 

 mere figure of speech to talk of snow-white sheets smelling 



