st be closed. There are fifteen miles to be
disposed of before dark, and darkness will be upon us in a couple of
hours. I can continue my soliloquising as I canter through the bush;
there will be no one to disturb me or ridicule me, unless, indeed, the
bird named the laughing jackass should make the woods echo with his
idiotic chuckle, or the parrots should scream their harsh derision.

CHAPTER VI

WITH VERDANT ALDERS CROWN'D

If you will step across to your bookshelf and take down that volume of
Pope's miscellaneous works, you will find the fable of Lodona, and the
words which I borrow for a heading. The little man so wrote of the
River Loddon, which he quite correctly described also as slow. The
Loddon is scarcely a river of itself to inspire a poem, being without
cataracts going down to Lodore, not being mountain born, nor overlooked
by crag and summit; but it is in an especial degree the kind of stream
which pastoral poets have from time immemorial loved to bring in as an
indispensable adjunct. Almost any portion of the country watered by
this river might have yielded the scenes of the immortal Elegy in a
country churchyard, though you may remember that Gray does not in the
poem make mention of a river, and only introduces the rill, and "the
brook that babbles by" as the habitual resort of the youth whom
melancholy marked for her own. But I have heard the curfew toll the
knell of parting day while watching the float, have marked the beetle
wheel his droning flight (half inclined to chase him to tempt the
wayward chub), and have looked upon the lowing herds winding slowly
o'er the lea as the signal for bringing the day's delights to a close
by winding up my fishing line.

"Sweet native stream," Warton calls the Loddon, and that is just the
association one familiar with its meads and wooded banks would bear
with him in a cherished corner of memory. For the ordinary angler
perhaps the river is a trifle too much with "alders crown'd." On the
contrary, to the person who can command the use of a boat, and drop
down upon the lazy current with a long line ahead of him, those dense
defences of the bank become conservators of sport. They are better
than a keeper, for they are always there, and cannot by any bribe be
seduced from their duty. And more than any other tree the alder is the
familiar companion of the angler. Upon some rivers the willow would
contest the position, perhaps, but Fate demands that