th him, you will be surprised more
and more at his knowledge, his sense, his humour, his courtesy; and you
will find out--unless you have found it out before--that a man may learn
from his Bible to be a more thorough gentleman than if he had been
brought up in all the drawing-rooms in London.

No. It was none of these, the salmon stream at Harthover. It was such a
stream as you see in dear old Bewick; Bewick, who was born and bred upon
them. A full hundred yards broad it was, sliding on from broad pool to
broad shallow, and broad shallow to broad pool, over great fields of
shingle, under oak and ash coverts, past low cliffs of sandstone, past
green meadows, and fair parks, and a great house of grey stone, and
brown moors above, and here and there against the sky the smoking
chimney of a colliery. You must look at Bewick to see just what it was
like, for he has drawn it a hundred times with the care and the love of
a true north countryman; and, even if you do not care about the salmon
river, you ought, like all good boys, to know your Bewick.

At least, so old Sir John used to say, and very sensibly he put it too,
as he was wont to do:

"If they want to describe a finished young gentleman in France, I hear,
they say of him, '_Il sait son Rabelais._' But if I want to describe one
in England, I say, '_He knows his Bewick._' And I think that is the
higher compliment."

But Tom thought nothing about what the river was like. All his fancy
was, to get down to the wide wide sea.

And after a while he came to a place where the river spread out into
broad still shallow reaches, so wide that little Tom, as he put his head
out of the water, could hardly see across.

And there he stopped. He got a little frightened. "This must be the
sea," he thought. "What a wide place it is! If I go on into it I shall
surely lose my way, or some strange thing will bite me. I will stop here
and look out for the otter, or the eels, or some one to tell me where I
shall go."

So he went back a little way, and crept into a crack of the rock, just
where the river opened out into the wide shallows, and watched for some
one to tell him his way: but the otter and the eels were gone on miles
and miles down the stream.

There he waited, and slept too, for he was quite tired with his night's
journey; and, when he woke, the stream was clearing to a beautiful amber
hue, though it was still very high. And after a while he saw a sight
which made him jum