largely a matter of opportunity. That one memory is all the friendship opportunity allows us. So with these rivers of a single day.
But when one has fished a water season after season for five years, then is its friendship a great and living thing. Of that little burn in Mull where one made such hay of the sea-trout one cherishes but a dim picture of dark pools, miniature brown-white cataracts, slate-blue hills, a leaden sky, the calling of the moor-fowl, and a heavy basket. But each feature of the long-fished stream is with one at all times—each curve and vista, each willow and withy-bed, the unguessable hatch-hole, the frank, revealing shallow, and the swelling downs and the distant clumps. These things are a possession that nothing can destroy so long as memory serves. Though paralysis should strike one into a living death, while memory were faithful one should yet wander in one's mind (by no means deliriously) through certain green water-meadows, eye busy with a certain stream where stout fish should always be rising. Other friends, older perhaps, dearer even than the river, should stand by the bedside, grieving at one's insensibility to their presence. Blind, deaf, dumb, feeling nothing, how should one cry to them for comfort? And what comfort could they give? But the river would come at
