with initials, not the landlady’s, I know.  What pretty things, too, in the basket!  A scissors, a capital shape for fly-making; a little file, and some floss silk and tinsel, the identical colour I want for a new fly I have in my head, one that will be a demon to kill.  The northern devil I mean to call him.  Some one looks in behind me, and a light step passes upstairs.  I drop the basket, I don’t know why.  There are some reviews near it.  I take up one, and am soon buried in an article on Tasmanian fauna.  It is strange, but whenever I do know anything about a subject, I always find these writing fellows either entirely ignorant or damned wrong.

After supper, I took a stroll to see the river.  It was a silver grey evening, with just the last lemon and pink streaks of the sunset staining the sky.  There had been a shower, and somehow the smell of the dust after rain mingled with the mignonette in the garden brought back vanished scenes of small-boyhood, when I caught minnows in a bottle, and dreamt of a shilling rod as happiness unattainable.  I turned aside from the road in accordance with directions, and walked towards the stream.  Holloa! someone before me, what a bore!  The angler is hidden by an elder-bush, but I can see the fly drop delicately, artistically on the water.  Fishing upstream, too!  There is a bit of broken water there, and the midges dance in myriads; a silver gleam, and the line spins out, and the fly falls just in the right place.  It is growing dusk, but the fellow is an adept at quick, fine casting—­I wonder what fly he has on—­why, he’s going to try downstream now?  I hurry forward, and as I near him, I swerve to the left out of the way.  S-s-s-s! a sudden sting in the lobe of my ear.  Hey!  I cry as I find I am caught; the tail fly is fast in it.  A slight, grey-clad woman holding the rod lays it carefully down and comes towards me through the gathering dusk.  My first impulse is to snap the gut and take to my heels, but I am held by something less tangible but far more powerful than the grip of the Limerick hook in my ear.

‘I am very sorry!’ she says in a voice that matched the evening, it was so quiet and soft; ’but it was exceedingly stupid of you to come behind like that.’

‘I didn’t think you threw such a long line; I thought I was safe,’ I stammered.

‘Hold this!’ she says, giving me a diminutive fly-book, out of which she has taken a scissors.  I obey meekly.  She snips the gut.

’Have you a sharp knife?  If I strip the hook you can push it through; it is lucky it isn’t in the cartilage.’

I suppose I am an awful idiot, but I only handed her the knife, and she proceeded as calmly as if stripping a hook in a man’s ear were an everyday occurrence.  Her gown is of some soft grey stuff, and her grey leather belt is silver clasped.  Her hands are soft and cool and steady, but there is a rarely disturbing thrill in their gentle touch.  The thought flashed through my mind that I had just missed that, a woman’s voluntary tender touch, not a paid caress, all my life.