But nothing really deterred Joe from fly-fishing--neither heat nor cold nor rain nor wind; he only regarded the weather at those times from the point of view of its influence on the sport. Even when it was too bad for fishing he couldn’t keep away from the water. But he could never keep away from water--he said it was the life of a landscape as the blood is the life of the human body. In our early days, when we were too poor for Highland trips, visits to friends on the Thames afforded him his best access to it; and, though he was not perhaps a perfect oarsman, as may be proved by a “stroke’s” petition that he would not “go so deep,” to which he replied: “Ah, I never leave a stone unturned!”--he loved the “noble river.” Though for perfect satisfaction he chose more swiftly running waters. I came across some passages in one of Stopford Brooke’s letters which strangely call to mind Joe’s passion for a free stream. “There is no companion like a quick stream,” writes the older man; “full, but not too full, capable of shallows and water-breaks, with deep pools when it likes and with a thousand shadows acquainted with all the tales of the hills....” And once more: “Running water surely is the dearest and best-bred thing in the world. And a great workman and a great artist.... Nor is there any Singer, any Poet, any Companion so near and dear as it is when it shapes itself into a mountain stream in a quiet country.” Often have I seen Joe beside such streams, and though it so chanced that the last happy holiday we had together was spent beside lakes rather than rivers, the sense of moving water remains associated in my mind with him through all the earlier days of our life. It was in Ireland--his motherland, though he had never seen it till then--that we passed those last unforgetable weeks of autumn. Even as we landed at Rosslare there seemed to fall upon him an unnameable affinity with the country of his blood; as we travelled slowly--very slowly--over her truly emerald bosom, he sat in a dream watching the little black cattle, that we afterwards learnt to beware of for “cross bastes,” as they cropped the sedgy meadows, his eyes wandering from them to the tender Irish sky and then waking into fun as he saw a peasant at a small station trip a boy up unawares and cuff him soundly, laughing as he did it. And when we reached Waterford--only a dirty town to me--he plunged at once among his people and laughed joyously at the retort of a begging urchin, whose pathetic plea of hunger he had pretended to rail at: “That’s where ye’re wrong, yer honour,” the cheery little villain had cried: “A man may be fat and hungry too.” The horse races were going on, and the inn was in an uproar, which he sat up most of the night to watch. But the next day sleepy ways prevailed once more, and it took us a long time to get off at the station, where I recollect his amusement at the porter’s instruction: “This way to America.”