above all, if the epithet may be allowed, Trollopian-" and therefore commonplace" may perhaps be added. Certainly, and commonplace, if you like for it is commonplace England that is incomparable. Foreigners don't care a rush about Cader Idris and Helvellyn and Ben Nevis. The world teems with sights that equal these in quality and dwarf them in size. But to the stranger, travelling for the first time from Liverpool or from Dover to the capital, our every-day English landscape appears in a light that those who have practically never left it cannot realise; and draws forth an admiration that can perhaps only be fully understood by such as have known an exile something longer than a vacation-tour.

ex

Whether the commonplace Englishman is such an object of admiration to the intelligent foreigner as commonplace rural England is a matter with which we have no concern. The Barsetshire folk, we fear, were ceedingly commonplace. That, however, does not prevent us from being exceedingly fond of them; and from the down above Chorleyford Magna you can see upon clear days the spire of Barchester Cathedral faintly traced against the sky. For those who revere the memory of Trollope, no more fitting spot could be found in which to drop the tributary tear than the churchyard of Chorleyford Magna. For but a slight effort of the imagination would be required to picture the vicar of Bulhampton, his harrowed feelings relieved by the capture of a brace of trout, striding towards the wicket in the clipped laurel hedge that leads towards the vicarage. From the trim lawn that surrounds that Cosy habitation the click of the croquet-balls has, it is true, long ceased to sound. Yet behind those French windows which look out upon the gay flower-beds and the yellow gravelled paths, fancy might even now depict some amiable Dorothea, some moist-eyed Frances, tortured by doubts as to whether she

is right or wrong in refusing the addresses of the athletic young Oxonian who has just been inducted to the living of Chorleyford Parva. There is the manor house, too, hard by, solid, Georgian, and respectable, with its pleasant pasture-lands between the downs and the river where the youth of Chorleyford play cricket in summer evenings. The blinds are down, for land-matters are bad in Wiltshire. If Frank were living there now, his mother and sisters would say with more emphatic decision even than they said long ago in the reign of Dr. Thorne, that "he must marry money."

Far away to the north and to the south stretch the bare bleak downs, for the valley of the Chorley is but a rich narrow strip amid the high chalklands which run from the Thames valley southward to the New Forest. Salisbury Plain, indeed, may be said to actually start from the white dusty road that skirts the vicarage garden and leads the traveller over many long and dusty miles to the ancient Wiltshire boroughs of Marlborough and Devizes. To the southward, hundreds of acres of unfenced tillage, of wheat and oats and turnip-land, trend gradually upwards till with a sharp spring the unbroken down throws its rounded outline against the sky-line. Forlorn clumps of firs crown here and there the lonely heights, ragged wind-shorn trees that look as if every gale would be their last. Yet, there they stand against the sky-roaring in the winter winds and moaning in the summer breeze-gaunt and erect as year after year and decade after decade goes bylocal landmarks as immutable and characteristic well-nigh as the greywithers of Avebury and the pillars of Stonehenge.

There, too, rising and falling across the bleak downs towards the metropolis of Trollopia, go the gleaming chalk roads, whose new-laid fints we have so often and so fondly heard in fancy grating beneath the high wheels of Dr. Thorne's gig, as under other

skies far removed from those of Wiltshire we have followed him in his rounds.

George, the keeper, knows nothing, alas, about Dr. Thorne or Archdeacon Grantley; but the best course to take when the trout are not rising is to go round to the bridge that leads into the wood and paddock sacred to his young pheasants. In any case it is a pleasant place to loiter in, for there is a tall elm and a green bank close by, and some big sluice-gates over which the usually placid Chorley pours its waters, churning and foaming and sparkling as if some mountain hollow and not a Wiltshire meadow had given it birth. In addition to this, George is pretty sure to put in an appearance before long: not, we will suppose for a moment, that the half-crown which he knows he may count on with such absolute certainty is the sole attraction. News, since the squire went to live abroad, has not flowed into Chorleyford with the same regularity as of yore; so a thirst for knowledge of the great world may perhaps qualify his more sordid motives. For George is of an inquiring mind, though you would not think it to look at him. Something, too, of a politician, and a staunch Tory of course, as becomes his professional calling. Our friend is a typical southcountry keeper of the more modest and rustic order. He gives no evidence of considering himself greater or grander than his relatives who hoe the turnips and reap the corn-fields on his beat. He is not, in short, a flunkey in hobnails, and may be considered a fair representative of Chorleyford Magna and studied as such, if you are a student of rural types. Indeed, I should be inclined to say that, in face and figure, he emphasizes the prevailing type of these parts. To a Londoner, he is a

joy to look upon. I am sure that a sight of his face would be almost as beneficial to an appreciative inhabitant of Bethnal Green as a day at the seaside. To compare its rotundity to the moon would be unoriginal, but strictly accurate. If George's face, however,

is as round as the orb of night, the fieriest flush that ever illumined the latter at harvest-time would pale beside the roseate hue that perennially mantles on the face of our friend in velveteens. It is not the hue of the omnibus-driver or the cabman, that may owe its richness in part or in whole to the grog-shop. George's bloom smacks of nothing but the north wind and autumn hail-storms on the downs. In the sense that I am thinking of at any rate, a river-side sense, George is a typical south-country keeper. He knows no more about fly-fishing than he does about political economy or the binomial theorem. His mission, so far as the river is concerned, is to see that no audacious and unaccredited angler from above or below invades its waters, and that no villager indulges in proceedings of a kind still more injurious to the trout. George's talents as a sportsman lie elsewhere. In the coverts there is no one who can bring down the pheasants he has raised, if required to do so, with more ruthless certainty than he. A November partridge, rising from the dripping turnips in the teeth of a hail-storm, has a poor chance when that stolid, rubicund, whisker-fringed face lies behind the hammers. Nor is there any one who in the sheltered hollows of the down can mark the tuft from which a hare will jump with anything like such certainty as George. But by the river-side he is a shocking ignoramus. For him the gentle art is a mystery, sealed and closed. In his heart of hearts I am afraid he despises it, for George has trod the banks of the Chorley in a business way ever since-well, by the local reckoning, say since five years before the " manoovers; yet he is still absolutely impervious to the fact that trout have eyes. If in his zeal for your success he wishes to point you out a rising fish, that same fish will to a certainty be laughing to himself under the bank thirty yards away long before our friend has finished taking stock of him; while, as for handling a landing-net, to this day I

never cast under the beech-tree at the corner below the bridge without a sigh over the noble three-pounder that went sailing off with a foot of gut on the only occasion I was rash enough to entrust it to George's reckless and unaccustomed hands. A greater contrast, indeed, to the light-footed attendant who leaps from rock to rock, abuses your flies, and points out the most likely runs upon a mountain river, can hardly be conceived than George. The latter is in no sense adapted to a stiff country, though where there is plenty of room to put his iron-shod foot down he can go at a steady gait practically for ever. His manner of dress, though eminently suited to his style of beauty, is suggestive of stubbles and turnips, not of rushing torrents and heathy hills. The skirts of the velveteen look equal to the storage of almost any number of rabbits and hares, while the thick wrinkles of his corduroy breeches will, on a hot July day, almost bring sympathetic beads of perspiration to your brow.

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To-day there is no friendly wind upon the surface of the Chorley. The rain-fall has been practically nil it is the end of June, too, and the sun is shining with, at any rate, sufficient brightness for the hay-makers in the meadows. From north and west come tales of dried-up streams and disappointed anglers. One thing, however, can be said for these slow southerr rivers: their waters are so manipulated for purposes of irrigation that the angler is practically secured against the disappointment of that half-dry bed so familiar to the frequenters of western streams in summer seasons.

On your Wiltshire river if the water is low at one point, at another it is, probably, dammed up till it oozes over the top of the spongy banks. This frequent manipulation of the water, however, is at times no doubt a sore disturber of

the arrangements of the fish. But on

the most famous reaches of famous chalk-rivers, where the angler ranks first and the farmer and the miller are compelled to respect the feelings and

pay regard to the convenience of the local club or corporation : where hatches

and sluices have to be handled with some regard to the susceptibilities of the trout, and where again weed-cutting is systematically carried on, and proprietors above and below harmoniously worked with, there is little trouble on this score. But at the Chorley brook there is, of course, no such elaborate machinery. You must take your chance with the miller, who is an autocrat, and thinks nothing of reserving in his mill-dam for a couple of hours most of the water that should be flowing under your fly. In addition to this, you may be thankful if George has been able to spare time from his more serious labours to cut the weeds, that by the middle of summer would otherwise transform the clear surface of the Chorley into a green carpet over which the moorhens and dabchicks race with impunity. Weeds are at once the blessing and the curse of chalk-streams. The former, when, as now, they are trailing their long streamers a foot beneath the surface, a covert for the fish and a mitigator of the clear transparency of the water. A curse, on the other hand, not only when they are allowed to close the stream and make fishing impossible, but when the cutting is carried on irregularly by numerous small proprietors. When, for instance, Farmer Worzel, who sublets his half-mile of fishing to two gentlemen in London, selects one day to cut his weeds, and Dr. Pestle, who comes in above, selects another, and the vicar, whose glebe entitles him to four hundred yards of water just below, commences operations on a third; and when, moreover, these exasperating operations are effected piece-meal, and the unhappy angler below is liable at any moment to be discomforted, overwhelmed, and driven home by the floating avalanche of vegetation. What chalk-stream fisher does not recall many such a bitter experience? At the long-wished-for period, perhaps, when the basket-strap is beginning to tighten on your

By June, however, the weeds even in uncared-for rivers have not got to their worst. They are still trailing and streaming below the surface. The chalk and gravel and mud that in spring-time reveals itself so plainly in the river's bed to the angler is now covered with the waving subaqueous crop, thick enough to shelter the heavy trout, but not sufficiently matted to offer them, when once hooked, much assistance in their frantic efforts to escape. It is about this time the May-fly makes its appearance, and the dry-fly fisherman comes out in all his glory. It is not only with the Mayfly, but through all the summer season, that the dry-fly is nowadays mainly relied on in these still chalk-streams. It would make a Scotchman stare (if the still transparent water had not already disgusted him) to see a Wiltshire man, or rather let us say a metropolitan angler, creeping up upon a Wiltshire trout. The faint circle far away under yonder tuft of rushes would scarcely have been noticeable to the north-water fisherman; but the practised dry-fly man can see a twopound trout beneath the surface where the ordinary mortal can descry nothing but the reflection of a blue sky chequered with fleecy clouds. There

No. 332.-VOL. LVI.

is a difference, however, between the fish who is merely visible and the fish that is rising. The former may be bullied into taking: the latter with the exercise of requisite skill and caution may be fairly expected to make advances of some kind. Down on one knee you had better go, as far below the rising fish as you think compatible with the certainty of being able to put the fly above him. If you have a fourteen-foot rod, so much the better. Cast after cast must be made in the air till the sedge or the alder is perfectly dry both in wing and hatch and dubbing: then, as for the twentieth time it is accurately poised above the nose of the expectant trout, let the point of the rod drop and the fly fall lightly upon the water, where with wings cocked and tackle outspread it will float upon the surface, a most irresistible morsel. It may be that your wily trout will resist it once, twice, or half-a-dozen times it may be at the first presentation your fly will disappear in that glorious swirl of water which is generally all the commotion made by a chalk-stream trout rising with serious intentions. Or some false cast again, or want of proper vigilance, may send our speckled friend with a rush to the shelter of the nearest bank.

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Such fishing may seem tame and slow to some. To others it appears the only trouting worth living for. It is fortunate that the tastes of anglers, like those of other mortals, differ that wherever their paths may lie, whether by the reedy banks and the peaceful scenes of the Kennet and the Itchen, or amidst the foam and roar of Scottish torrents or Canadian rapids, the feeling that urges them on and brings them back again and again with a zest that only ends with the failure of physical powers, is the same; while the angling memories, we may be sure, that are associated with millhatch and water-meadow are as sweet and as lasting as those which belong to cataract and mountain-peak.

A. G. BRADLEY.

I

THE house had formerly been inhabited by a painter; and the studio, which spread its gaunt unshapen length along the southern wall of the neglected garden, had been given over to the old man that he might divert himself in it as he pleased without fear of domestic invasion. Evidently it was a place where the intruding foot of wife or housekeeper was never suffered a forlorn disordered place: dark, too, for the great window was all smirched and blind with dust, and scraps of paper with queer, cabalistic devices were stuck over the lower panes, and rain showers charged with soot had blurred it till it was now almost opaque. It was a long and lofty room. Here and there the walls were smeared with rude grotesque sketches, which remained to satirise the memory of the late proprietor, as his genius had expressed itself in his idlest or most fantastic moods. The dim corners were spun all across with cobwebs : dark blotches of some long-dried chemical fluid, like old blood-stains, showed upon the bare flooring; and a little ridge of dust on either side of a smooth path some two and a half feet wide, running the length of the eastern wall, marked the course trodden by the old man when he paced his workshop in thought or meditation. The rest of the floor was covered by a fine layer of dust.

The old man himself was just the kind of old man whom you would have expected to find in such a place. The brown and wrinkled skin was stretched tightly over his forehead and the upper part of his skull, which ascended to a sort of blunted point. A thin irregular fringe, too pale to be called grey, too faded to be white, circled his head on a level with the ears, and gave him so far the air of an aged and withered monk. There was still a certain bold

ness in the forehead, but the eyebrows that had been full and bushy had become mere ragged and colourless tufts. The mouth retained a little of its native firmness, though the loss of the teeth had deprived it of half of its character; but what powers of expression and what show of intellect had vanished from the other features seemed to have concentrated themselves chiefly in the eyes, from which there radiated a light of almost unnatural brilliancy. An eagerness, a curiosity, and a painful. restlessness glittered in them, and they appeared never to take in the half of what they longed to see.

This old man was an Alchemist: probably the last of the Alchemists.

A long line and a curious is the line of the Alchemists. At the head of it we may place Hermes Trismegistus, the Egyptian, concerning whom so little is known that we need not hesitate to accept the conjecture of his biographer that at a certain period of his life he died. Some would assign priority of date to Zofimus the Panoplite, who said that one could make gold out of lead if one went the right way to work, and who may have been Chancellor of the Exchequer in a government whose pecuniary resources were waning.

The old Alchemist in the studio had tried honestly in his day to make gold out of lead, and out of stones, plants, and heaven knows what other things he had his Powder of Projection and his metals; his crucible, his furnace, and a poker of the proper sort, like the other Alchemists; but he had not made any gold. Ten fruitless years he had spent in the endeavour to produce it by technical and prescribed processes of separation, of maturation, and of transmutation; and then, on a day in bright midwinter,