So step by step she made her way down the first pool; the broken water at the head gave no reply to the casting of the fly upon the waters, and with a little more line, and still a little more line as the pool grew broader, she went down to the tail. There, far out in mid-stream, was a big submerged rock, with a triangle of quiet water below it, and more line and more line went out before she could reach it. Then--oh, moment of joy!--the fly popped down on the far side of the rock, and with entrancing little jerks and oscillations of the rod, she drew it across the backwater. And then--she felt as if it must be so--the dark stream was severed, a fin cut the surface, the rod nodded, bent to a curve, with an accelerating whizz-z-z out ran the line, and a happy fishmonger looked anxiously, rapturously at her gillie. A couple of hours later Madge had come to within a hundred yards of the Bridge-pool, her fish secure in the creel, and her aspirations for it reaching, somewhat sanguinely as she knew, as high as sixteen pounds. The Bridge-pool itself was this morning part of Lady Ellington's water, for on Madge's side it ran swirling and boiling round a great cliff of nearly precipitous rock, some fifty feet high, over which she had to pass before getting to the skeleton wire bridge which crossed the river just below the pool. She could see her mother half-way down the pool already, and called to her, but her voice was drowned by the hoarse bass of the stream as it plunged from rapid to rapid into the head of the pool below, and after trying in vain to make her hear, and communicate the glorious tidings of the fish, Madge followed her gillie up the steep, rocky pass which led over this cliff. As she mounted the stony stair, steep and lichen-ridden, the voice of the water that had been in her ears all morning, and rang there still like the tones of some secret, familiar friend, grew momently more faint, but another voice, the voice of the sunny noon, as friendly as the other, took its place, and grew more intense as the first faded. From the shadow and coolness and water-voices she emerged into the windy sunlight of the moor; bees buzzed hotly in the heather, making the thin, springlike stems of the ling quiver and nod beneath their honey-laden alightings, swallows and martins chided shrilly as they passed, and peewits cried that note which is sad or triumphant according to the mood of the hearer. Then as she gained the top of this rocky bastion, sounds more indicative of human presences were in the air, the report of a gun came from not far off, and immediately afterwards a string of shots. Though she had killed her salmon with such gusto only an hour or two before, Madge could not help a secret little joy at the thought that probably this particular grouse had run the gauntlet of all the guns and had escaped again for another spell of wild life on the heather. Then, following the gillie's finger,