212 WATERSIDE SKETCHES. 



it is useless to argue with you. Out of such trifles great 

 what-is-it's spring, if your favourite poet is to be beHeved. 



" Garstanger Park is one of the most beautiful because 

 one of the best timbered in the country. Had that October 

 day on Viscount Garstanger's lake been a blank as to fish, 

 I should have deemed the seventy-mile trip fiom town, the 

 early rising on a raw morning, and the journey across country 

 more than compensated for by the russet glory of the autumn- 

 tinted woods, the exquisite proportions of the shrubberies, 

 the artistic arrangement of lawn and garden, the wide pro- 

 spects caught through the beeches on the knolls, the avenues 

 of patriarch trees, the change of landscape at every curve of 

 the path, and the keen clear atmosphere which you gulped 

 rather than breathed. 



" This kind of scenery puts you into good humour, and 

 screws up any slack strings of poetry or sentiment there may 

 be in you. It never took me so long before to put my rod 

 together, partly because of the beautiful leaf tints reflected 

 in the lake, but chiefly because, making ready to enter one 

 of the two punts which belonged to the boat-house, I saw a 

 young lady. She might- be handsome or she might not ; 

 that I could not determine until she changed her position. 

 It was her compact, flexible figure, and peculiar costume, 

 that first attracted my notice. I was conscious, too, of a 

 freedom of attitude that under any other circumstances 

 would have been displeasing. She stood some distance oflf, 

 her back towards me, with one foot on the stern-board of 

 the punt, and was postured like an athlete, as, turning 

 slightly away from the lake, with rod over her shoulder, she 

 winched up the loosened coils of a fishing-line. 



" The boobiest of fellows lay in the bottom of the punt. 



