But at the old-fashioned market-town of Ringwood, where the last ten-mile stretch of the river begins, is a famous hostelry known as "The White Hart." I use the epithet advisedly, for near Ringwood the Avon having degenerated in the matter of its inhabitants from trout to pike, now aspires to greater honours than ever, and ends its days as a salmon river, and one, too, with a reputation for harbouring the largest of the royal race of almost any river in England, though in no great numbers to be sure. The "White Hart" has been the immemorial trysting-place of the few anglers who assemble here to catch the Avon salmon, a fish more notable, as I have said, for weight than numbers, and not infrequently running over 40 lbs. The blind Cambridge tutor and Postmaster-General of a generation ago, Professor Fawcett, a native of South Wilts, was in his day a well-known member of this band. The Avon and the Test, also in Hampshire, are, I think, the only two chalk streams up which the salmon runs, though in both, of course, but for a limited distance, and rises to the fly. This fact has naturally always given the final stretch of the Avon, below Ringwood, peculiar interest among those concerned not merely with angling but with the natural history of rivers, which might almost be accounted, however, a branch of the craft. So, leaving the great fir-sprinkled heaths, a continuation, as it were, of the New Forest, to spread westward towards Bournemouth, our river flows uneventfully onward through meadow flats to Christchurch and the sea. Christchurch Abbey, at the Avon's mouth, is, of course, the goal of innumerable excursionists from the neighbouring Bournemouth; but Salisbury, a beautiful old town in itself, and a Cathedral matchless of its kind and Cathedral precincts matchless for their beauty, without any reservation is, of course, the Avon's glory. Usually called the "Hampshire," sometimes the "Christchurch" Avon, it should, of course, by rights be called the Salisbury Avon, for it is pre-eminently a Wiltshire river, bearing, as we have seen, the waters of half that county to the sea through a strip of Hampshire without receiving any contribution of consequence from that fair county. But there is, one must remember, another Wiltshire Avon, which runs through the lower-lying greensand and dairy country of North Wilts, and curiously enough, like its southern chalk-stream namesake, gathers all the waters of North Wilts that the Kennet or infant streams do not bear away eastward, into its bed. This Avon, of quite another quality, and one more akin to that of Shakespeare's farther north again, finds a world of fame and consequence in its lower reaches at Bath and Bristol, far different from such as Ringwood and Christchurch with their 40 lb. salmon can lend to the mouth of the purer and otherwise more beautiful stream.