RIVER GARDENS; 
considers an effectual defence. There is, as I have 
said, a certain indefinable charm, especially to a 
young angler, in watching these larger and better 
known denizens of the water; hut how much more 
eager is the stirred curiosity to define the stranger 
forms of creatures unknown, or much less fre¬ 
quently observed, such as the larvae of many semi- 
aquatic insects, or the early stages of the Newt, 
during which his external breathing apparatus, those 
mysterious branchiae, appear like some parasitic 
plant springing from his head. How much more 
eagerly the eye follows the gem-like gleam, as it 
passes, which is emitted from the air-filled globule 
of the Water-spider, shooting past like an aquatic 
firefly, hut hearing a flame of silver instead of gold; 
and then the mysteriously moving mass that con¬ 
tains the Caddis-worm, or the strange antics of the 
larva of the Gnat. These are the moving things, with 
hundreds of other kindred shapes, which fill the 
young imagination with elfin pictures, dream-like 
as those it might embody in some dark chamber of 
romance. How often did I try, frequently at the 
risk of falling headlong into the deep pond, to 
fish up some of the dimly-seen creatures which so 
strongly excited my curiosity ! But they generally 
escaped through the meshes of the little net I had 
