Out of this fairy spring was taken quite recently, but not with the
"dry" fly--for no fish could be deceived in water of such stainless
transparency--a trout that weighed three pounds and a half. He was far
and away the most beautiful trout we ever saw; as silvery as a salmon
that has just left the sea, he was a worthy denizen of the secluded
depths of that crystal spring, still welling up from the pure limestone
rock in the heart of the Cotswold Hills, as it has for a thousand years.

I was told that the place was still owned by the descendants of the
pious John Coxwell who built the manor house and commemorated it by the
quaint inscription over the porch in 1590. Doubtless the architecture of
all our Elizabethan manor houses in the shape of a letter E owes its
origin to the first letter in the name of that great queen.

That year was a fitting time for the building of "those haunts of
ancient peace" that have ever since beautified the villages of rural
England. Not two years before men's minds had been stirred to a pitch of
deep religious enthusiasm by what was then regarded throughout all
England as a divine miracle--the destruction of the Spanish Armada.
Scarce three years had passed since the war with Scotland had terminated
in the execution of the ill-fated Mary Queen of Scots. It is difficult
for us, at the close of this nineteenth century, to realise the feelings
of our ancestors in those times of daily terror and anxiety. And when
men were daily executed, and human life was held as cheap as we now
value a sheep or an ox, no wonder John Coxwell was pious, and no wonder
he engraved that pious inscription over those crumbling walls.

In the year 1590 there was a lull in those tempestuous times, and men
were able to turn for a while from the strife of battle and the daily