Contrary to the saying of Izaak Walton, the trout do not seem to care much for grasshoppers nowadays, although perhaps they may relish them in streams where food is less plentiful.  Our trout even prefer the tiny yellow frogs that are to be found in scores by the brook-side in early August.  We have often offered them both in the deep “pill” below the garden; and though they would come with a dart and take the little frog, they merely looked at the grasshopper in astonishment, and seldom took one.

As we stand on the rustic bridge above the “pill” gazing down into the smooth flowing water, dark trout glide out of sight into their homes in the stonework under the hatch.  These are the fish that rise not to the fly, but prey on their grandchildren, growing darker and lankier and bigger-headed every year.  Wherever you find a deep hole and an ancient hatchway there you will also find these great black trout, always lying in a spot more or less inaccessible to the angler, and living for years until they die a natural death.

Was ever a place so full of fish as this “pill”?  Looking down into the deeper water, where the great iron hooks are set to catch the poachers’ nets, I could see dozens of trout of all sizes, but mostly small.  At the tail of the pool are lots of small ones, rising with a gentle dimple.  As the days became hotter and the stream ran down lower and lower, the trout left the long shallow reaches, and assembled here, where there is plenty of water and plenty of food.

Standing on the bridge by the ancient spiked gate bristling with sharp barbs of iron, like rusty spear and arrow-heads (our ancestors loved to protect their privacy with these terrible barriers), I listened to the waterfall three hundred yards higher up, with its ceaseless music; the afternoon sun was sparkling on the dimpling water, which runs swiftly here over a shallow reach of gravel—­the favourite spawning-ground of the trout.  There is no peep of river scenery I like so much as this.  Thirty yards up stream a shapely ash tree hangs its branches, clothed with narrow sprays, right across the brook, the fantastic foliage almost touching the water.  A little higher up some willows and an elm overhang from the other side.

There is something unspeakably striking about a country lane or a shallow, rippling brook overarched with a tracery of fretted foliage like the roof of an old Gothic building.

Who that has ever visited the village of Stoke Poges in Buckinghamshire will forget the lane by which he approached the home and last resting-place of the poet Gray?  Perhaps you came from Eton, and after passing along a lane that is completely overhung with an avenue of splendid trees, where the thrushes sing among the branches as they sing nowhere else in that neighbourhood, you turned in at a little rustic gate.  Straight in front of your eyes were very legibly written on grey stone three of the finest verses of the “Elegy.”