My friend Ponsonby Smith, who is one of the oldest fly-fishers in the three kingdoms, said to me once:  Take my word for it, there are only four true salmo; the salar, the trutta, the fario, the ferox; all the rest are just varieties, subgenuses of the above; stick to that.  Some writing fellow divided all the women into good-uns and bad-uns.  But as a conscientious stickler for truth, I must say that both in trout as in women, I have found myself faced with most puzzling varieties, that were a tantalizing blending of several qualities.  I then resolved to study them on my own account.  I pursued the Eternal Feminine in a spirit of purely scientific investigation.  I knew you’d laugh sceptically at that, but it’s a fact.  I was impartial in my selection of subjects for observation—­French, German, Spanish, as well as the home product.  Nothing in petticoats escaped me.  I devoted myself to the freshest ingenue as well as the experienced widow of three departed; and I may as well confess that the more I saw of her, the less I understood her.  But I think they understood me.  They refused to take me au serieux.  When they weren’t fleecing me, they were interested in the state of my soul (I preferred the former), but all humbugged me equally, so I gave them up.  I took to rod and gun instead, pro salute animae; it’s decidedly safer.  I have scoured every country in the globe; indeed I can say that I have shot and fished in woods and waters where no other white man, perhaps ever dropped a beast or played a fish before.  There is no life like the life of a free wanderer, and no lore like the lore one gleans in the great book of nature.  But one must have freed one’s spirit from the taint of the town before one can even read the alphabet of its mystic meaning.

What has this to do with the glove?  True, not much, and yet it has a connection—­it accounts for me.

Well, for twelve years I have followed the impulses of the wandering spirit that dwells in me.  I have seen the sun rise in Finland and gild the Devil’s Knuckles as he sank behind the Drachensberg.  I have caught the barba and the gamer yellow fish in the Vaal river, taken muskelunge and black-bass in Canada, thrown a fly over guapote and cavallo in Central American lakes, and choked the monster eels of the Mauritius with a cunningly faked-up duckling.  But I have been shy as a chub at the shadow of a woman.

Well, it happened last year I came back on business—­another confounded legacy; end of June too, just as I was off to Finland.  But Messrs. Thimble and Rigg, the highly respectable firm who look after my affairs, represented that I owed it to others, whom I kept out of their share of the legacy, to stay near town till affairs were wound up.  They told me, with a view to reconcile me perhaps, of a trout stream with a decent inn near it; an unknown stream in Kent.  It seems a junior member of the firm is an angler, at least