The truth is that the art of fishing can only be acquired on the banks of a stream, and is rarely acquired at all unless it has been practised in boyhood. And even so it lies not within the reach of all, even of those who ardently desire to succeed. I remember a comrade in one of my earlier fishing excursions in Scotland who laboured zealously but fruitlessly to obtain even the most modest degree of proficiency, and as he stood up in the boat, his line hopelessly entangled for the hundredth time, the gillie who was rowing us, moved by a spirit of prophecy that broke down all social reserve, suddenly turned to him and addressing him by his Christian name: “Frank, Frank,” said he, “you’re a good fellow, but you’ll _never_ be a fisherman!” And in truth he never was. And yet, once a measure of mastery is won, fishing remains for those who love it an abiding passion. Time leaves undisturbed the keen excitement of the first adventure, and with each return of spring the longing to be out beside a stream sets the pulses newly beating. One day when we were trudging through a field of turnips in Fifeshire, the late Sir William Harcourt, as though pierced by sudden conviction, turned to me with the remark, “Carr, what a bore sport is!” And of some forms of sport that, I think, may sometimes be truly said. But your true fisherman is never bored. He counts no day blank till it is ended, for the last hours, as he well knows, may restore his broken fortunes and set a goodly brace or two in the empty basket. And there is no sport, I think, that sorts so well with the occupations of a writer. Shooting and stalking need the surrender of the entire day, and are too exhausting to leave any appetite for intellectual labour. But with fishing it is not so. The angler who has the good fortune to dwell beside a stream can divide his energies between work and sport without neglect of either, and in my own case I have found them go happily hand in hand. Much of my play of _King Arthur_ was written by the shores of Rannoch, which I had first known and loved as a boy, and there is a little cottage in Hertfordshire, unhappily no longer mine, that enshrines many happy memories wherein work and sport are linked in close association. Walking tours have gone out of fashion nowadays; the bicycle and motor-car have engendered another taste, and have partly ruined the quiet ways that were once the exclusive property of the pedestrian. But they were a favourite pastime in the sixties and seventies, and, apart from the longer sojourn we used to make in the Lake District or in Scotland, there was scarcely an Easter or a Whitsuntide holiday which did not find me among the hills of Westmoreland and Cumberland. There, with a friend of my early years and still a friend to-day, we explored every hill and dale of the Lake District.