I found the boys much changed. Edward was very tall, and had begun to speak meditatively of Oxford. He still drawled a little, and fussed over his clothes, but he had taken keenly to politics, and aired socialistic theories which he argued hotly with the squire. Dick had grown quite polite, comparatively speaking, and offered to teach me golf, but we had so many other occupations on hand that I never found time to learn. George had got over the stage of keeping white mice in his pockets, and talked mostly about cricket; he was still at his preparatory school, but he was to leave soon for a training-college for the Navy. They were all as full of fun and chaff as ever, and laughed yet over the remembrance of our joke with the burglar. Marshlands looked beautiful in the spring-time. The cherry orchards were in full blossom, the woods were tinged with the faintest of tender greens, and we found violets in every hedgerow. It was early April, and the distant fells were capped with snow, while the air had enough of a northern chill in it to make quick walking a pleasure. We were close to the lake country, on the borders of that mountain district where crag and moorland, pine-wood and tarn combine to make some of the most glorious scenery in the British Isles. I have always had an extreme love for the hills, whether they were the rocky sierras of my childhood, or the rugged peaks of Cumberland. Once up on the slopes, with the fresh wind blowing on your cheek, and the valley spread out like a map below, you feel as if you had left the cares of the world behind, and were in a different moral as well as physical atmosphere. If it is true that our surroundings really have an effect upon our characters, I think that those who live on a mountain can never be quite so petty and mean-minded as the dwellers in the plain beneath; something in the majesty of those peaks must surely draw them up, and lift their thoughts towards that other world that is higher than ours. The days were not half long enough for all our delightful projects. Mr. Winstanley had fulfilled his promise of teaching me to fish, and, armed with the light rod-and-line, I industriously and laboriously whipped the stream; but I fear I was anything but a "compleat angler", for very few of my contributions went to fill the baskets of silvery trout which the boys seemed to catch so cleverly. "I'm afraid a fisherman is something like a poet, 'born, not made'," I sighed, as I watched Dick choose a fresh fly and secure a catch in the very pool where I had tried for half an hour in vain.