properly stimulated, and the shallow lake has become a series of empty pans floored with sand and seaweed among which the sea-stream (you might wet your ankles in it) meanders, clear as crystal and still as glass, save when a flounder wallows across it. I am not a surveyor, and I cannot reach any just approximation—at any rate, not within a million gallons or so—of the amount of water which has to flow out, twice a day, through the sea-gate. But this is a matter of very minor importance, for in flowing out it makes a very pretty, narrow, V-shaped torrent, gliding down to a big, tumbling, foaming pool, where the sea-trout lie, and if Neptune, god of fishes, wills it, go for any standard pattern that you send them.
My first experience of these sea-trout was very painful. I had been casting all morning in a dead calm on the lake, and I had done badly, very badly. There are few games better worth playing than throwing a dry-fly from a boat over rising fish. But when they are not rising and will not be tempted, it is a most dispiriting form of exercise. At two o'clock, I gave it up and went down to the sea-stream to find it tearing through the sea-gate—deep, strong, and foaming. I had never seen it like that before, for hitherto, in my ignorance, I had fished it on the low ebb.
