nobly.  They have learnt it in the severe school of adversity.  It is the richer class that we should like to see taking a greater interest in their humble neighbours; and their power is great.  The possessor of wealth is too often the tacit upholder of the doctrine of laissez faire.  The times we live in will no longer allow it.  Let us be up and doing.  In many small ways we may do much to promote good fellowship, and bitterness and discontent shall be no longer known in the rural villages of England.

II.

In the dead of winter these old grey houses of the Cotswolds are a little melancholy, save when the sun shines.  But to every variety of scenery winter is the least becoming season of the year, though the hoar frost or a touch of snow will transform a whole village into fairyland at a moment’s notice.  Then the trout stream, which at other seasons of the year is a never failing attraction, running as it does for the most part through the woods, in mid winter seldom reflects the light of the sun, and looks cold and uninviting.  One may learn much, it is true, of the wonders of nature in the dead time of the year by watching the great trout on the spawn beds as they pile up the gravel day by day, and store up beautiful, transparent ova, of which but a ten-thousandth part will live to replenish the stock for future years.  But the delight of a clear stream is found in the spring and summer; then those cool, shaded deeps and sparkling eddies please us by their contrast to the hot, burning sun; and we love, even if we are not fishermen, to linger by the bank ’neath the shade of ash and beech and alder, and watch the wonderful life around us in the water and in the air.

As you sit sometimes on a bench hard by the Coln, watching the crystal water as it pours down the artificial fall from the miniature lake in the wild garden above, you may make a minute calculation of the day and hour that that very water which is flowing past you now will reach London Bridge, two hundred miles below.  Allowing one mile an hour as the average pace of the current, ten days is, roughly speaking, the time it will take on its journey.  And when one reflects that every drop that passes has its work to do, in carrying down to the sea lime and I know not how many other ingredients, and in depositing that lime and all that it picked up on its way at the bottom of the ocean, to help perhaps in forming the great rolling downs of a new continent—­after this island of ours has ceased to be—­one cannot but realise that in all seasons of the year a trout stream is a wonderfully interesting and instructive thing.

TO THE COLN.