"Painter. I declare to you it is all a bewitchment: my tongue is ever ready to praise every next turning of the river more than the other; and I scarcely know which to like best, this angling or the landskips. Look you! There again are rocks springing up like steeples on this side and on that; it is all full of surprises.

66

Angler. Those Rocks are called 'The Tissington Spires,' for that retired village lies but the distance of a walk to the left. So now I have brought you within a view of Thorpe Cloud.

"Painter. Is that Thorpe Cloud? Well, he is more changeable than Proteus; for here he looks like a beheaded cone.

"Angler. And now, brother, you are come towards the end of the Dale.

"Painter. Tell me not this sad news! or if we must needs depart, let us first 'sit down by the waters, and hang our harps upon the Willows, and weep."

Now I too must say adieu to Dove Dale and its sweet stream, and close my account of this my short and last visit with these lines from "The Retirement," by Charles Cotton:

"Oh, my beloved nymph, fair Dove!
Princess of rivers! how I love

Upon thy flow'ry banks to be;

THE WHITE HORSE OF BERKSHIRE, ITS ORIGIN-THE SCOURING OUR PLEASANT QUARTERS-MAY FLY TIME-WATCHING A BIG TROUT-HOOKED

AND

LOST A PAIR OF DOVES

"I go

Where thousand flaming flowers grow;
And every neighbouring hedge I greet
With honeysuckle smelling sweet;
Now o'er the daisied meads I stray
And meet with, as I pace my way,
Sweetly shining on my eye
A rivulet gliding smoothly by."

June, 1901.

DYER.

T was in the vale of the renowned White Horse of Berkshire that I went in search of the May Fly, and a few other thing besides, in

this month of June, 1901. There are other white

horses dug out of the sides of mountains, but this is the oldest of the family, and is supposed to have been carved out to commemorate a victory over the Danes in the year 871. It consists of a trench, two feet deep, cut in the side of a steep hill, and I am told that it is now partly obliterated, and stands much in need of another scouring out, such as that so graphically described by Mr. Tom Hughes in his work, "The Scouring of the White Horse." Here is a brief epitome of the origin of "The White Horse."

In the year 866 a great army of pagan Danes came over to Britain and landed in Norfolk. The cause of their coming was to avenge the murder of a man of royal birth named Lodbroc, who had two sons, Hinguar and Hubba. Their father had gone out one day in a small boat to catch ducks. He was caught in a storm and eventually cast upon the coast of Norfolk, where he was found with his hawk on his wrist, and taken to King Edmund, who, finding him to be a man of great skill in all kinds of sport, appointed him to a place in his service, which caused great jealousy in the heart of Berne the huntsman, who murdered him.

When Edmund discovered this, the huntsman was exposed on the sea without oars in Lodbroc's boat, and in some days he was cast ashore in Denmark. There he was put to the torture by Lodbroc's sons, and being a liar and murderer told them that their father had been put to death by King Edmund. This was the cause of their landing in England. They fought many battles with King Edmund, who was at length wounded and taken prisoner; he was tied to a tree and shot through the body with their arrows.

At Ashdown in the year 871 King Ethelred and his brother Alfred defeated these pagans with great slaughter. It is a year for Berkshire men to be proud of, and in memory of the great battle King Alfred caused his army to carve the White Horse, the standard of Hengist, on the hillside, just under the castle as you see it this day.

The last "scouring" took place in 1857; since that time it has been allowed to get silted up and overgrown with weeds. The commemoration of the millennial of the great king's death seems to be the time for giving it another scouring.