This morning I went for a walk alone to see the country and talk at leisure to the peasantry. My first visit is always to the Shannon; through my open windows, I can hear in the night the roaring of its cascades. Its banks are covered with superb trees, and nothing is more charming than a walk there in the morning. It can only be made by passing through private grounds, for from here to Castle Connell the whole country between the high road and the river is occupied by the parks of seven or eight castles or country houses. But in this country the owners seem to invite you to enter their properties. Everywhere you find hurdle fences or gates always standing open. I own that I was first attracted by the fly-fishing. Amongst us a fisherman is nearly always an elderly man for whom life has ceased to have illusions. He likes solitude, and consoles himself by the society of the gudgeons in place of the mortifications of an existence passed on the stool of a bureau or in the thick atmosphere of a back shop; the fraternity is also recruited by a number of retired officers; there are even some old captains of the line who belong to it, but they are in bad odour with the general inspectors and are never promoted to a superior rank. English fishermen are very different. That which amongst us is almost regarded as the first halting-place in the progress towards the final softening of the brain, is, on the contrary, amongst our neighbours, considered a brevet of supreme elegance. Angling is one of their most-appreciated sports. A whole literature is devoted to it. When a young cavalry guardsman can announce to his comrades, towards the month of June, that he has obtained three weeks’ leave to go and install himself in a hut in Sweden, on the banks of a stream where he can get some fly-fishing, he becomes the object of secret envy amongst all his less fortunate comrades. If a French novelist made one of his heroes enjoy fly-fishing, you would feel sure that he is a husband, who would be abominably deceived before the third chapter; when an English one wishes to explain the lightning flash that kindled in Miss Kissmequick’s heart an inane love for the lively Irish Major O’Kelshick, he describes him taking three trout in ten minutes before the young heiress! That is quite enough to subjugate her, and not an English girl reads it but she inwardly owns that it would be quite enough for her too!