68 WATERSIDE SKETCHES. 



rock to rock, and beholding their present melancholy dead 

 level, it was but too true that just a trifle of sunshine seemed 

 to have departed. Would the Yealm, yet another of the 

 Dartmoor brood, dispel the cloud ? Two or three miles 

 further, and lo, the Yealm coincided with its sister streams. 

 My only consolation was that in the same carriage journeyed 

 to South Brent a young gentleman who was in worse plight 

 than myself: three salmon rods, a huge wooden-framed 

 landing net, fit receptacle for a shark ; wading apparatus, 

 gaffs, and an outfit generally that would stock a tackle- 

 maker's shop, he had brought with him from town ; and 

 certainly he looked the picture of misery when I showed 

 him the sort of brook upon which his costly machinery was 

 to be exercised. 



The valley traversed by the Tavistock Railway, to which 

 at Plymouth we were transferred, is not to be surpassed, if 

 indeed equalled, in this country for sustained sylvan beauty. 

 I know of nothing to compare with it but the grand wooded 

 slopes that keep you awake with surprise and admiration 

 between Dieppe and Rouen. If the Plym valley be not so 

 wide as that charming portion of fertile Normandy, its trees 

 are larger and more numerous. Lord Morley's property at 

 Saltram is the beginning of a stretch of woody hillside that 

 continues with unbroken picturesqueness for miles. Such 

 beeches, elms, ashes, sycamores, aspens, firs, maples, and 

 oaks seldom indeed are to be looked upon from the windows 

 of a railway carriage. 



A few local anglers, who, it cheered the despondent 

 stranger to think, would not have ventured forth unless there 

 had been some chance of sport, got out at Bickleigh, and 

 descended through the foliage towards the Plym, there 



