experienced it when out alone in a great forest, or on an unknown lake; and it always meant "ware danger" of some kind. But why should I feel it here? Yet I did, and I couldn't shake it off. I took to examining the room. It was a commonplace one of the usual type. But there was a work-basket on the table, a dainty thing, lined with blue satin. There was a bit of lace stretched over shiny blue linen, with the needle sticking in it,--such fairy work, like cobwebs seen from below, spun from a branch against a background of sky. A gold thimble too, with initials,--not the landlady's, I know. What pretty things, too, in the basket!--a pair of scissors, a capital shape for fly-making; a little file, and some floss silk and tinsel, the identical color 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-gray evening, with just the last lemon and pink streaks of the sunset staining the sky. There had been a shower, and someway 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 toward the stream. Holloa! some one 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 up the stream, 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 down stream 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, gray-clad woman holding the rod lays it carefully down and comes toward 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.