their dresses and gloves fitted
perfectly. But this joy can be felt but once in a life, and the
first fish comes back as fresh as ever, or ought to come, if all
men had their rights, once in a season. So, good luck to the
gentle craft, and its professors, may the Fates send us much into
their company! The trout fisher, like the landscape painter,
haunts the loveliest places of the earth, and haunts them alone.
Solitude and his own thoughts--he must be on the best terms with
all of these; and he who can take kindly the largest allowance of
these is likely to be the kindliest and truest with his fellow
men.

Tom had splendid sport that summer morning. As the great sun rose
higher, the light morning breeze, which had curled the water,
died away; the light mist drew up into light cloud, and the light
cloud vanished, into cloudland, for anything I know; and still
the fish rose, strange to say, though Tom felt it was an affair
of minutes, and acted accordingly. At eight o'clock he was about
a quarter of a mile from the house, at a point in the stream of
rare charms both for the angler and the lover of gentle river
beauty. The main stream was crossed by a lock, formed of a solid
brick bridge with no parapets, under which the water rushed
through four small arches, each of which could be closed in an
instant by letting down a heavy wooden lock gate, fitted in
grooves on the upper side of the bridge. Such locks are frequent
in the west-country streams--even at long distances from mills
and millers, for whose behoof they were made in old days, that
the supply of water to the mill might be easily regulated. All
pious anglers should bless the memories of the old builders of
them, for they are the very paradises of the great trout, who
frequent the old brickwork and timber foundations. The water in
its rush through the arches, had of course worked for itself a
deep hole, and then, some twenty yards below, spread itself out
in wanton joyous ripples and eddies over a broad surface some
fifty yards across, and dashed away towards a little island some
two hundred yards below, or rolled itself slowly back towards the
bridge again, up the backwater by the side of the bank, as if
longing for another merry rush through one of those narrow
arches. The island below was crowned with splendid alders,
willows forty feet high, which wept into the water, and two or
three poplars; a rich mile of water meadow, with an occasional
willow or alder