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: 
“Tt 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 
