What they have achieved by care and constant stocking in a naturally fine trout stream can be seen by any strollers upon the bank. The smaller trout of wild rapid streams, who take the fly so much more readily, rush madly for safety the moment you show yourself upon the bank above a pool. But the big chalk-stream trout, so much more wary of the deadly fly, is comparatively indifferent to the mere spectator. Possibly the superior education that has quickened his perception in the matter of artificial flies and their method of presentation has also taught him that in them alone danger lurks, and in mere man as such there is none whatever. So it comes about that in the Wiley you may look down in places through three or four feet of crystal water, and at quite close quarters watch every movement of a score or so of great trout or grayling of from 1 to 2 lbs. weight, as they lie poised above the clear gravelly bottom; a beautiful and interesting spectacle only possible in the chalk streams, and, one might almost add, only in those that modern fish-culture and science have been busy with. So between the banks of what is still called the Avon, all these chalk streams and a few others of less size and note pour their united waters in broader and more chastened current from Salisbury towards the sea. They have a long and pleasant journey yet, however, before they meet the tide at Christchurch. By the great seats of Longford, Clarendon, and Trafalgar the Avon makes its way down a rich valley to Fordingbridge. Thence, with the skirts of the New Forest rising above its narrow opulent valley upon one side and the high country of Dorset upon the other, this whole burden of clear Wiltshire water, every drop curiously enough that the county produces south of the Thames or the Bristol Avon watersheds, urges its now chastened course to Ringwood and Christchurch. It has often struck me, when standing by one or other of the great surging mill-pools which make such delightful interludes in this pleasant valley between Fordingbridge and Ringwood, as a curious and pretty thought that the entire overflow of the most romantic and famous chalk region in England should be thus chafing in a single Hampshire pool beneath one's feet; that not a drop from all this vast wild Wiltshire upland should have escaped elsewhere, but that every welling spring beneath the downs from Savernake Forest to Cranborne Chase, from Warminster to Ludgershall, should here find its inevitable destiny. Clear as the waters of the Avon for this reason still remain, the trout by now have gradually yielded to the pike and perch, which for their size and quality have made these lower reaches of the river somewhat celebrated among anglers who follow that branch of the craft.