recited, as they came up, Sir Walter's descriptive verse:

"One burnished sheet of living gold,
Loch Katrine lay, beneath him rolled!"

But I was not always so well attuned to the environment. I had got
hold of a hook and line at some hotel on the Lakes, and the old
passion for fishing, which had remained latent since Lenox days for
lack of opportunity, returned upon me with great virulence. So, one
day, when we had set out in a row-boat to visit Rob Roy's cave, I
requested, on arriving there, to be permitted to stay in the boat,
moored at the foot of the cliff, while the others climbed up into the
cave, and, as soon as they had disappeared, I pulled out my line, with
a dried-up worm on the hook, and cast it over the side. I wanted to
see the cave, but I wanted to catch a fish more. Up to that time, I
think, I had caught nothing in all our pilgrimages. If ever Providence
is going to give me success (I said to myself, devoutly), let it be
now! Accordingly, just before the others came back, I felt a strong
pull on my line and hauled in amain. In a moment the fish, which may
have been nine inches long, but which seemed to me leviathan himself,
broke the surface, wriggling this way and that vigorously; but that
was the extent to which my prayer was granted, for, in the words of a
rustic fisherman who related his own experience to me long afterwards,
"Just as I was a-goin' to land 'im, sir, he took an' he let go!" My
fish not only took and let go, but he carried off the hook with him.

I remember wandering with my father through a grassy old church-yard
in search of Wordsworth's grave, which we found at last, looking quite
as simple as his own most severely unadorned pastoral; but I had not
attained as yet to the region of sentiment which makes such things