face, no bird on its bushy banks. There are salmon in plenty doubtless, and plenty of pike and perch, and the usual run of coarse fish, but of trout there are very few. It is not the sort of stream that I should care to waste my time by fly-fishing it. It is said to be partly preserved, but there are no water-bailiffs hereabouts, and anybody can fish who pleases without much fear of being interfered with. Those who do fish, I presume, are the local knowing ones, who fix themselves in cosy corners and fish for perch where they know they are to be found.

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After starting, a pair of twin-sisters, in Gloomy Plinlimmon,” and wandering through many a county far apart, the Wye and Severn meet again Chepstow way, to be absorbed in the "Severn Sea."

I was curious to estimate roughly the speed of this lordly river hereabouts. It seemed to me that the great mass of water moved, like a stream of molten silver, at the rate of, say, three miles an hour, and as I take it to be about forty miles to its junction with the Severn, the water passing me now will not get into the sea for probably twenty hours from this time. I

remember once standing on the banks of the Nile at Cairo with Sir H. M. Stanley.

"Look," said he, "that water passing us now in all probability I saw at the sources of the Nile six months ago. It has travelled ten or twelve thousand miles (I forget the exact length), and at its average rate it would take six months to come from there here. It has been travelling steadily along its own course, whilst it has taken me just as long to get here; so here again I meet the same water that first greeted me in the Mountains of the Moon."

I set out in the hope of meeting with some incident worth mentioning; in that I have been disappointed, but I do assure you that many years have passed since I have had such an ideal day for an afternoon's ramble, or a ramble in scenery more pleasant and picturesque than I have had on this Good Friday of the year of grace 1902.

A

CHAPTER VI

ON THE WYE

COMIC AND A TRAGIC STORY-CHUB-FISHING-A
VISIT TO DORSTONE AND THE DORE IN THE
GOLDEN VALLEY

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UST as "in youth a young man's

fancy lightly turns to thoughts of

love," so does an old man's fancy with more of wisdom, as he thinks, bred from experience, turn to fishing. I am on the side of the ancients.

I find myself once again in the neighbourhood of the Wye, and in company of the dear old man, who is as great a cripple, but as full of cheery anecdotes as ever. I will give you

one or two samples, deprived of much of their raciness in the telling. His stories are generally of a tragic character, but here is one which has something of the comic element. A neighbour farmer had come home from market late at night, and jolly as usual, to put it mildly. Sitting over the fire he soon fell asleep, and managed to drop his beautiful set of false teeth into the ashes. Next morning the housemaid in raking out the grate found these teeth, and, horrified at the sight, she rushed upstairs, screaming, "Oh Missis! Missis! the master's fell in the fire and is burnt to ashes, and there's nothing left but his teeth, and here they be! Oh, oh!".

Another over-true tragic story was that of an acquaintance of his in his youthful days, about the time when the Rebeccaites were going about destroying turnpike gates. A gay young spark had been at a hunt meet, and, riding a splendid colt, came up to a turnpike gate--three sheets in the wind. He insisted on having the The old woman refused

gate opened at once. till the gate-money was paid. He swore he wouldn't pay; if he couldn't pass through the gate, he'd go over it. He turned round, backed his horse for a short distance, and made a dash

at the gate. The horse cleared it grandly, but caught the hoof of the off hind leg in an iron bar that covered one end of the top of the gate, and the poor brute came down on his head, and was killed on the spot. The youth was taken up insensible, and is still living, a highly respected old gentleman.

Another and extraordinary thing happened only a few months ago to an old friend of his. He was breaking a splendid young cart-house to work in the team. The horse was being hooked on to the team at plough in a field; something startled him, and he bolted just as they were hooking the traces. The farmer was

knocked down, and the traces somehow caught round his foot, and by an extraordinary chance got firmly hooked.

The horse broke off at full gallop, dragging the man by the one leg. Somehow he managed to get the free leg over the other as the horse dashed through a hedge, and then, by a still more remarkable chance, the other trace got hooked to the one round the foot, and so providentially both legs were kept together; so it happened that the horse, still at full gallop, took two more fences and came into the turn