All this week I have been fishing for a large trout which lives—he still lives—hereabouts. He has just gone away, as he always does sooner or later.
The only thing that I can find to say in favour of this fish is that he has chosen for his dwelling a part of the river which I so greatly love.
In those far-off days when I was competent to catch trout, I have daped some woundy ones out of this narrow, shallow, jungly backwater. Here Chavender takes them freely. It is the overflow from many hatches up river. Where it begins who shall say? Its origin is lost in water-meadows, but it is fishable to the first drop. In a morning I have scared, not caught, a round dozen of two-pound trout in this inconsiderable runlet. On the hot still afternoons when the main river is hopeless as Avernus, here the fat yellow things swim slowly in the cool shade up and down, up and down, each on his own beat, sucking in the insects which fall from the roof of trees.
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