it should run to
pollard, and so get too high up in the world to be a close companion to
man.

We always make friends with the somewhat prosaic and even sombre alder,
and, in return, it always has something to show us. All through the
autumn and winter it makes as goodly a display as it can with its long
barren catkins; in the spring it is thick with the queer black little
husks; and in the summer and autumn its defects of shape in the matter
of branches are hidden by close, dark, glossy leaves, which sturdily
hold on when others have been snatched and scattered. And does not an
old poet ascribe to our alder the quality of protector to other growths?

The alder, whose fat shadow nourisheth--
Each plant set neere to him long flourisheth.

But it is interesting to remember that a still older poet had his eye
on the alder, and it is a pretty conceit in which Virgil fixes upon its
wood as the origin of shipbuilding. The timber is so easily worked and
so handy that it might well have been actually used by primitive man
when the gods prodded him on to activity and invention by piling up
obstacles and difficulties in his path. Virgil, therefore, had fair
warrant for

Then first on seas the hollowed alder swam.

Spinning tackle and fly casts have I left upon alder bushes of a score
of streams, but instead of bearing it any ill-will I hereby offer it
humble and sincere homage, especially as in my early days of fly
fishing I, in honest faith and unbroken conviction, used one of its
juicy leaves for straightening the gut collar.

The Loddon, if not important as a navigable stream, or as busy as other
rivers in the service of the miller, does a fair share of steady work.
Rising in the North Hampshire downs near Basingstoke, the river runs
through historical country. Cromwell's troopers, for instance, during
the siege of Basing would no doubt water their horses in the fords of
the Loddon, and Clarendon, who wrote the history of that rebellion,
lived at Swallowfield. Near this village, almost within our own times,
lived Mary Russell Mitford, whose delightful book, _Our Village_,
neglected for years and almost forgotten, has set sail again before the
favouring breeze of the cheap edition. She wrote her sketches at Three
Mile Cross, some two miles from Swallowfield, and I refer to them
because in the little volume you have faithful scenic pictures of the
Loddon country. I have also a personal story to tell, to