wall would increase the sense of home, of guarded security, which not
the mountain, but the sea, or the very thought of the sea, gives to
all true Englishmen.

Let others therefore (to come back to angling) tell of moor and loch.
But let it be always remembered that the men who have told of them
best have not been mountaineers, but lowlanders who carried up to the
mountain the taste and knowledge which they had gained below. Let
them remember that the great Sutherlandshire sportsman and sporting
writer, the late Mr. St. John, was once a fine gentleman about town;
that Christopher North was an Edinburgh Professor, a man of city
learning and city cultivation; and, as one more plea for our cockney
chalk-streams of the south, that Mr. Scrope (who passed many pleasant
years respected and beloved by Kennet side, with Purdy at his heels)
enjoyed, they say, the killing of a Littlecote trout as heartily as
he did that of a Tweed salmon.

Come, then, you who want pleasant fishing-days without the waste of
time and trouble and expense involved in two hundred miles of railway
journey, and perhaps fifty more of highland road; and try what you
can see and do among the fish not sixty miles from town. Come to
pleasant country inns, where you can always get a good dinner; or,
better still, to pleasant country houses, where you can always get
good society; to rivers which will always fish, brimfull in the
longest droughts of summer, instead of being, as those mountain ones
are, very like a turnpike-road for three weeks, and then like bottled
porter for three days; to streams on which you have strong south-west
breezes for a week together on a clear fishing water, instead of
having, as on those mountain ones, foul rain spate as long as the
wind is south-west, and clearing water when the wind chops up to the