hl by the eleven o'clock train.

For the future I resolved to give up the illusory idea of coming home by
rail, and ordered a little one-horse carriage to meet me at some point
on the high-road every evening at nine o'clock. In this way I managed to
cover the whole stream, taking a lower part each day, from the lake of
Hallstatt down to Ischl.

There was one part of the river, near Laufen, where the current was very
strong and waterfally, broken by ledges of rock. Below these it rested
in long, smooth reaches, much beloved by the grayling. There was no
difficulty in getting two or three of them out of each run.

The grayling has a quaint beauty. His appearance is aesthetic, like a
fish in a pre-raphaelite picture. His colour, in midsummer, is a golden
gray, darker on the back, and with a few black spots just behind his
gills, like patches put on to bring out the pallor of his complexion. He
smells of wild thyme when he first comes out of the water, wherefore St.
Ambrose of Milan complimented him in courtly fashion "Quid specie tua
gratius? Quid odore fragrantius? Quod mella fragrant, hoc tuo corpore
spiras." But the chief glory of the grayling is the large iridescent fin
on his back. You see it cutting the water as he swims near the surface;
and when you have him on the bank it arches over him like a rainbow. His
mouth is under his chin, and he takes the fly gently, by suction. He is,
in fact, and to speak plainly, something of a sucker; but then he is a
sucker idealised and refined, the flower of the family. Charles Cotton,
the ingenious young friend of Walton, was all wrong in calling the
grayling "one of the deadest-hearted fishes in the world." He fights and
leaps and whirls, and brings his big fin to bear across the force of the
current with a variety of tactics that would put his more aristocratic
fellow-citizen, the trout, to the blush. Twelve of these pretty fellows,
with a brace of good trout for the top, filled my big creel to the brim.
And yet, such is the inborn hypocrisy of the human heart that I always
pretended to myself to be disappointed because there were not more
trout, and made light of the grayling as a thing of naught.

The pink fishing license did not seem to be of much use. Its exhibition
was demanded only twice. Once a river guardian, who was walking down
the stream with a Belgian Baron and encouraging him to continue fishing,
climbed out to me on the end of a long embankment, and with proper