Some people hold the same epitaph to be irreverent, because in a list of Barker’s many blessings occurs the profane word “trout:”  but those trout, and the custom which they brought him, had made the old man’s life comfortable, and enabled him to leave a competence for his children; and why should not a man honestly thank Heaven for that which he knows has done him good, even though it be but fish?

He is gone:  but the Whit is not, nor the Whitbury club; nor will, while old Mark Armsworth is king in Whitbury, and sits every evening in the Mayfly season at the table head, retailing good stones of the great anglers of his youth,—­names which you, reader, have heard many a time,—­and who could do many things besides handling a blow-line.  But though the club is not what it was fifty years ago,—­before Norway and Scotland became easy of access,—­yet it is still an important institution of the town, to the members whereof all good subjects touch their hats; for does not the club bring into the town good money, and take out again only fish, which cost nothing in the breeding?  Did not the club present the Town-hall with a portrait of the renowned fishing Sculptor? and did it not (only stipulating that the school should be built beyond the bridge to avoid noise) give fifty pounds to the said school but five years ago, in addition to Mark’s own hundred?

But enough of this:—­only may the Whitbury club, in recompense for my thus handing them down to immortality, give me another day next year, as they gave me this:  and may the Mayfly be strong on, and a south-west gale blowing!

In the course of the next week, in many a conversation, the three men compared notes as to the events of two years ago; and each supplied the other with new facts, which shall be duly set forth in this tale, saving and excepting, of course, the real reason why everybody did everything.  For—­as everybody knows who has watched life—­the true springs of all human action are generally those which fools will not see, which wise men will not mention; so that, in order to present a readable tragedy of Hamlet, you must always “omit the part of Hamlet,”—­and probably the ghost and the queen into the bargain.

CHAPTER I.

Poetry and prose.

Now, to tell my story—­if not as it ought to be told, at least as I can tell it,—­I must go back sixteen years,—­to the days when Whitbury boasted of forty coaches per diem, instead of one railway,—­and set forth how, in its southern suburb, there stood two pleasant houses side by side, with their gardens sloping down to the Whit, and parted from each other only by the high brick fruit-wall, through which there used to be a door of communication; for the two occupiers were fast friends.  In one of these two houses, sixteen years ago, lived our friend Mark Armsworth, banker, solicitor, land-agent, churchwarden, guardian of the poor, justice