y of this inn has a nice little
stretch of water for the use of those who find their way to Bibury; and
a pleasanter place wherein to spend a few quiet days could not be found.
The garden and old court house of Bibury are sweetly pretty, the house,
like Ablington, being three hundred years old; the stream passes within
a few yards of it, over another waterfall of about ten feet, and soon
reaches Williamstrip. Here, again, the scenery is typical of rural
England in its most pleasing form; and the village of Coln-St.-Aldwyns
is scarcely less fascinating than Bibury.

After leaving the stately pile of Hatherop Castle and Williamstrip Park
on the left, the Coln flows silently onwards through the delightful
demesne of Fairford Park. Here the stream has been broadened out into a
lake of some depth and size, and holds some very large fish. Another
mile and Fairford town is reached, another good specimen of the Cotswold
village--for it is a large village rather than a town--with its lovely
church, famous for its windows, its gabled cottages, and comfortable
Bull Inn. There are several miles of fishing at the Bull, as many an
Oxonian has discovered in times gone by, and we trust will again.

From what we have said, it will easily be gathered that this stream is
unsurpassed for scenery of that quiet, homely type that Kingsley
eulogises so enthusiastically in his "Chalk Stream Studies," and I am
inclined to agree with him in his preference for it over the grander
surroundings of mountain streams:

"Let the Londoner have his six weeks every year among crag and heather,
and return with lungs expanded and muscles braced to his nine months'
prison. The countryman, who needs no such change of air and scene, will
prefer more homelike, though more homely, pleasures. Dearer to him than
wild cataracts or Alpine glens are the still hidden streams which Bewick
has immortalised in his vignettes and Creswick in his pictures. The long
grassy shallow, paved with yellow gravel, where he wades up between low
walls of fern-fringed rock, beneath nut and oak and alder, to the low
bar over which the stream comes swirling and dimpling, as the
water-ouzel flits piping before him, and the murmur of the ringdove
comes soft and sleepy through the wood,--there, as he wades, he sees a
hundred sights and hears a hundred tones which are hidden from the
traveller on the dusty highway above."

But _chacun a son gout_! Let us now see what sort of sport may be