As to the lake’s vulgarly useful qualities, it contains the best char in the world, and quantities of unsurpassable trout of delicious flavour, and often of large size—for instance, there was one cut up at your present quarters, some time since, which weighed fourteen pounds. Of its pike, I need only say that one of them roasted or baked “with a pudding in its belly,” is, on certain occasions, worth all the scenery in the neighbourhood. It is also rich in eels and perch, more particularly the latter. It serves as a commodious highway towards the port of exportation for two hundred and fifty tons of copper ore every month, as well as for nobody knows how much slate, flags, birch brooms, and small timber. Conjointly with the circumjacent mountains and valleys, and the copper mines, it brings, during each laking season, a goodly haul of fish to your host’s net, in the form of tourists and visitors. There has been only one person drowned in it within the memory of man, and he was a stupid, drunken fellow, who walked into it over the slate quay. Of course, under these circumstances, the most harmless water in the world could do nothing else but drown him. [Sidenote: SOMETHING “OLD KIT” SAYS.] Of its ornamental characteristics you shall judge for yourself, as soon as you finish eating. Well, having despatched a few cups of coffee and a fair proportion of a most satisfactory array of etceteras, (for be it remarked, _en parenthese_, that a breakfast furnished by Mrs Atkinson does not yield even to that at Grasmere described by Christopher North, in terms sufficiently graphic, “to create an appetite under the ribs of death,”) you may take a look from the window. Your first impulse is an expression of gratitude to me for advising you to make a hearty breakfast before looking forth, for assuredly, say you, this would, if seen before, have effectually withdrawn your attention from the creature comforts before you, albeit first-rate. [Sidenote: RHYME AND A REASON FOR IT.]