scenery winter is the least becoming season of the year, though the hoar
frost or a touch of snow will transform a whole village into fairyland
at a moment's notice. Then the trout stream, which at other seasons of
the year is a never failing attraction, running as it does for the most
part through the woods, in mid winter seldom reflects the light of the
sun, and looks cold and uninviting. One may learn much, it is true, of
the wonders of nature in the dead time of the year by watching the great
trout on the spawn beds as they pile up the gravel day by day, and store
up beautiful, transparent ova, of which but a ten-thousandth part will
live to replenish the stock for future years. But the delight of a clear
stream is found in the spring and summer; then those cool, shaded deeps
and sparkling eddies please us by their contrast to the hot, burning
sun; and we love, even if we are not fishermen, to linger by the bank
'neath the shade of ash and beech and alder, and watch the wonderful
life around us in the water and in the air.

As you sit sometimes on a bench hard by the Coln, watching the crystal
water as it pours down the artificial fall from the miniature lake in
the wild garden above, you may make a minute calculation of the day and
hour that that very water which is flowing past you now will reach
London Bridge, two hundred miles below. Allowing one mile an hour as the
average pace of the current, ten days is, roughly speaking, the time it
will take on its journey. And when one reflects that every drop that
passes has its work to do, in carrying down to the sea lime and I know
not how many other ingredients, and in depositing that lime and all that
it picked up on its way at the bottom of the ocean, to help perhaps in
forming the great rolling downs of a new continent--after this island of
ours has ceased to be--one cannot but realise that in all seasons of the
year a trout stream is a wonderfully interesting and instructive thing.